Â鶹Éç

Good morning.

I remember the first time a mobile phone rang while I was teaching, more than 25 years ago. Only a handful of students had mobiles and having it ring in class provoked many envious giggles. The first time, I smiled and asked the girl to turn it off. The second time I was firmer. The third time, well, let’s just say, there was no fourth time. An hour long seminar was wasted, because students focused was going on outside the classroom, rather than engage with one another and the task at hand.

I’m not a technophobe. I love my smartphone, probably too much. But it is distracting. It takes up part of my mind so that I find it harder to concentrate on the people in front of me. At times, it helps me escape from them. This is part of the problem the government is trying to tackle with guidance on banning mobile phones in schools. Schools are not just about learning content for minds – we could do that online. There’s something different about being physically together. We learn to practice different skills: reading body language; responding to distress; learning the right boundaries for physical interactions; dealing with difference and disagreement as whole people, rather than online projections of who we want to be. In the physical world, it’s harder to escape into bubbles of like-minded people.

Christian thinker Jim Cotter writes, I am not a no-body, nor just any-body, but some-body. The Christian faith is an embodied faith, it speaks of incarnation, of God coming to meet us in the person of Jesus Christ. Bodies are valued and precious enough for God to create them and inhabit one. Bodies are how we relate to the world, human and non-human, they make us part of the same reality. They remind us that we are partial and need one another: no one can grow up and survive completely alone.

Our expansive digital reality holds huge potential and opportunities. It helps us transcend space, sometimes time, connect when housebound. But digital presence is limited, because it only engages part of a person, and can allow them to hide their physicality, the small reactions of body language, the vulnerability of being human.

Maybe all of us should consider having time regularly to engage only as physical people; when we attend to who and what is around us, and ponder what it means for the way we treat one another and the physical world. We are not no-bodies, nor just any-bodies, but some-bodies, fragile and vulnerable, yet, as one of the Psalms says, fearfully and wonderfully made.

Show less