Show Notes
How social media and algorithms capture your attention, and a Christian response grounded in Scripture and spiritual practice.
It's Friday afternoon in Jerusalem, around 430 years before Christ, and merchants from Tyre are selling fish at the city gates as the Sabbath draws near. The governor, Nehemiah, orders the gates shut, and the next week the merchants come back and camp outside the wall in the dark, waiting for someone to slip out and buy. Today the merchants don't camp outside the wall. They've moved into the house, the bedroom, and the pocket, and the thing they're selling is us.
In this episode, Graham explores social media, the attention economy, and what both are doing to the Christian soul, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He starts with Australia's world-first ban on social media for under-sixteens and the regulator's finding that most teenagers are still online, then traces the attention trade back through Benjamin Day's penny newspaper and the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, Luther's pamphlet wars, and Benedict's Rule. He follows the biblical thread from Nehemiah shutting the gates, to the command to guard your heart in Proverbs, to Jesus' teaching on the single eye, to Paul refusing to be mastered by anything, and on to the new Jerusalem whose gates are never shut. He engages with voices like Augustine, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Jacques Ellul, Kosuke Koyama, and James K. A. Smith, alongside the work of Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism, Anna Lembke on dopamine and compulsion, and Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski on how contested the research on screens and wellbeing really is. He offers a five-question digital rule of life drawn from his book Digital Monasticism, with practical steps for individuals, families, and churches in settings from Sydney to Jakarta to Nairobi. And he asks who your attention belongs to, what the hunger to be seen is really a hunger for, and how to guard the gates when the merchants are already inside the walls.
Book recommendations: "The Attention Merchants" by Tim Wu, "The Anxious Generation" by Jonathan Haidt, "The Tech-Wise Family" by Andy Crouch, and "Digital Monasticism" by Graham Joseph Hill
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