We're being formed by our devices. Today's digital technologies are designed to captivate our attention and encroach on our boundaries, shaping how we relate to time and space, to ourselves and others, even to God. Our natural longing for relationship makes us vulnerable to the "industrializing" effects of social media. While we enjoy the benefits of digital tech, many of us feel troubled with its power and exhausted by its demands for permanent connectivity. Yet even as we grow disenchanted, attempting to resist the digital "powers that be" might seem like a losing battle.

Sociologist Felicia Wu Song has spent years considering the personal and collective dynamics of digital ecosystems. She combines psychological, neurological, and sociological insights with theological reflection to explore two major questions:



- What kind of people are we becoming with personal technologies in hand?

- And who do we really want to be?

Song unpacks the soft tyranny of the digital age, including the values embedded in our apps and the economic systems that drive our habits. She then explores pathways of meaningful resistance that can be found in Christian tradition—especially counter-narratives about human worth, embodiment, relationality, and time—and offers practical experiments for individual and communal change.

In our current digital ecologies, small behavioral shifts are not enough to give us freedom. We need a sober and motivating vision of our prospects to help us imagine what kind of life we hope to live—and how we can get there.



Felicia Wu Song (PhD, University of Virginia) is a sociologist and author of Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence and Place in the Digital Age and Virtual Communities: Bowling Alone, Online Together. With almost twenty years' experience serving as faculty at Louisiana State University and Westmont College, she combines her training in history, communication studies, and sociology with a personal interest in theology to speak and teach on matters of spiritual formation and well-being in a digitally-saturated society. Living in the Pacific Northwest, she enjoys discovering a good food truck with her husband and two teenaged children. For her latest activities, see http://feliciawusong.com.



Acknowledgments



Introduction: Confessions

Part I



1. Being at Altitude: Understanding the Digital Ecology



The Freedom Project: Experiments in Praxis: An Overview



2. The Terms of Agreement: What Digital Media Companies Have Known All Along



The Freedom Project: Experiments in Praxis: Stage One: Digital Media Fast



3. The Industrialization of You and Me: How Social Media Makes Relationships a Business



The Freedom Project: Experiments in Praxis: Stage Two: Digital Stocktaking

Part II



4. The Good News



5. Created for Communion, Settling for Connection: A Theological Anthropology



6. Digital Practices as (Secular) Liturgy



The Freedom Project: Experiments in Praxis: Stage Three: Secular Liturgy and Counterliturgy



7. Reimagining Time and Attention: Soul Formation in a Culture of Productivity



8. Embodied and Embedded: Transforming Sites of Faithful Presence and Sacred Spaces



9. The Church as Counterliturgy: Alternative Futures of Faith Communities



The Freedom Project: Experiments in Praxis: Stage Four: Alternative Futures



Index



"Dr. Song unpacks a modern digital landscape that is cracked and parched—but she doesn't leave us in our thirst. Instead, she extends her hand and guides us back to the source of living water by way of a well-trodden path she has traveled with her students throughout her professorship. It is a true gift to journey with Dr. Song toward a reimagined relationship with our devices—one where we're transformed less by them, and more by Christ."