The Spring issue of Redeemer University’s Resound magazine featured an article about Dr. Katie Day Good, a Christian professor who has been researching the history of how tech gets adopted, and what sort of impact it has.

“She found that teachers have often been early adopters of technologies including motion pictures, stereographs, records, illustrated magazines and radio to enliven and increase the effectiveness of their teaching…. Teachers around the world were eager to think about how these technologies could help their students think beyond their borders.”

Teachers loved the tech, because it was all about connecting their students to the world around them. But today we’re finding something quite different. As Dr. Good put it in that same article, “Hope beyond the screen”:

“What we’re discovering as we grow and age with these technologies is that they can also stand in the way of meaningful connection. They can even lead us to feel estranged from our neighbours, from our environment, from God.”

AI is only going to make that estrangement worse, with reports already of people turning to these super-powered programs for companionship.

So how can we deal with the digital distraction, and the social isolation? There’s no one answer, but Good shared what a couple of groups have chosen to do.

“Something I’ve seen is parents banding together to create landline pods, using landline phones to encourage friendship and independence among their children without having to rely on smartphones.”

Then there is “The Luddite Club” she learned about – a group of New York students who have chosen to unplug and connect in tech-free ways.

Earlier this year, a Cornell University prof made news for getting her students to type their reports. She brought in bunch of old typewriters, and the students had to shift gears entirely – the lack of a delete key had them thinking through what they were going to type before they typed it. With their phones banned, students weren’t distracted by notifications, but also couldn’t research in an instant, and ending up asking each other for help – their class become a place for conversation rather than head-down, isolated scrolling.

There there’s what’s happening at Redeemer itself. This past year, faculty at the Christian college who are involved with its “Core Curriculum” – 10 courses that all students have to take – have “adopted a tech-wise approach, encouraging students to swap laptops and tablets for pen and paper.” They aren’t going full Amish – this is just a select number of courses, and while pen and paper are encouraged, laptops aren’t banned. It’s a small but real effort being made to put restraints on tech usage. Why? Because it just makes sense. As Dr. Jonathan Juilfs, Redeemer’s associate professor of English, explained, “many studies have shown that students retain more information and learn better with traditional note-taking methods.” That’s not a startling revelation, but it is news how some schools are starting to act on what we all already know: our screen usage has gotten out of hand, and that even includes our purportedly “educational” usage too.