A hundred years ago, progressive women marched through New York’s streets demanding suffrage and equal rights. Some smoked cigarettes in public—a provocative move intended to push against the stigma of smoking as merely a “man’s treat.” By the 1950s, smoking had become synonymous with glamour in Hollywood and normalized throughout society, with Big Tobacco company Philip Morris sponsoring America’s favorite TV show, I Love Lucy.
Fast forward 75 years, and smoking on-screen now earns a show a “TV-MA” rating or at least a cautionary disclaimer. Cigarettes are banned from nearly every public place, and smoking rates have plummeted. Today, debates swirl around newer trends like vaping or the legalization of certain drugs. Still, the cultural shift on smoking remains undeniable, driven by irrefutable evidence of its connection to cancer.
The smoking revolution makes me wonder, What else might our society radically rethink over the next century?
Myth of Unstoppable Technological Habits
Our society, shaped profoundly by an Enlightenment eschatology of progress, often assumes a straight-line trajectory toward something better. We reflexively believe each technological advance marks a step upward. Yet history shows something else. Imagine telling those progressive women in the 1920s—boldly challenging the antismoking stigma—that within a century, their revolutionary habit would become culturally taboo. They’d find it unthinkable. And yet, here we are.
What assumptions are made with confidence today that future generations might find similarly baffling? Just a decade ago, hundreds of schools rushed to integrate iPads into classrooms—only to remove them after statistics revealed detrimental effects on students’ learning. Could other technological habits we unquestioningly accept today undergo the same reconsideration?
Questioning Our Digital Habits
Could there come a day when endless scrolling is recognized as damaging to mental health in the same way smoking harms physical health? Will we reevaluate the appropriate age for smartphone use or reconsider adults’ immersion in social media? Will future generations look back on today’s unlimited access to pornography with horror and disbelief?
At first, digital advancements always seem full of promise. Email simplified communication, Facebook reconnected old friends, Twitter fed our hunger for news, Instagram gave us glimpses into each other’s lives, and TikTok mesmerized us with its uncannily addictive algorithm. Yet we now live in a world of compulsive scrolling, trained—like animals—to keep mindlessly reloading the feed. The consequence? A numbness that dulls attention, dampens wonder, and corrodes our capacity to be fully present wherever we are.
Watching a movie on a big screen in our living room, a marvel that would have captivated our great-grandparents, doesn’t contain enough stimulation for us, so we reach for our phones and keep swiping, our eyes darting back from the big screen to the small. Then there’s the relentless pressure to publicize our lives, seeking validation from strangers online. Even when all the likes in the world don’t add up to love. Even when amassing followers doesn’t satisfy the itch for fame. Even when the endless stream of videos can’t crowd out our sadness.
You know the statistics: anxiety, depression, loneliness—all skyrocketing in an age of digital abundance. Despite the conveniences smartphones offer, they’ve come with unintended consequences. Political discourse is toxic, thanks in part to those perpetually plugged into outrage. Churches and associations struggle as people opt for pseudofriendships and counterfeit connections online.
So I ask again: Will we continue blindly toward an always online future? Or might there be an awakening?
Signs of Change?
Recent trends hint at a possible shift. There’s rising momentum for restricting smartphone use in schools, fueled by compelling research from scholars like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge. On Christian college campuses, young adults looking for friends or a future spouse tell me incessant posting is a relational “red flag.” Government oversight of harmful algorithms and explicit online content is gaining traction. Even virtual reality, once proclaimed as the inevitable future, faces unexpected pushback, with tech giants incurring substantial financial losses as consumers resist deeper digital immersion.
Let me be clear. We will not be going back to a predigital era. No one can read Anton Barba-Kay’s masterful A Web of Our Own Making and miss how pervasive the ramifications of our new inventions are. Digital technology has reshaped our expectations, identity, and sense of reality. The digital world is here to stay.
But this doesn’t mean we must follow the script tech enthusiasts have written.
Reclaiming Our Humanity
I wonder if we’ll see peer pressure exerted against the overengineering of social media platforms, a new fondness for unplugging from everything online, a move away from the soul sickness that descends on us when our whole lives revolve around this magic device in our hands.
I wonder if we’ll look back at this era much the way we look back at the people in the 1940s and ’50s, smoking their lives away. Didn’t they know how bad that was for them? Only this time, it could be us, considering our past phone practices and saying, Why did it take us so long to change course?
We’re humans, not robots—no matter how impressive artificial intelligence becomes. We possess agency. We can course-correct. Yes, our choices are influenced by cultural pressures we don’t fully grasp. But together we can alter the future. Smoking wasn’t inevitable. Neither is scrolling.
I have to hope that, like grass peeking through the cracks in the digital pavement, we will reclaim our humanity—that we will not be enslaved to devices that rob us of wonder and mystery, that we will recognize the goodness of this world God has given us, that we will marvel at the flesh-and-blood immortal people who stand next to us every Sunday singing praises to God, that we will open our eyes and put down our phones.
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