Felicia Wu Song is a cultural sociologist, a professor teaching at Westmont College, an author, and a lecturer. She is also an honest-to-goodness pleasant person to converse with, a bonus for Joy and me when we interviewed Felicia. In her recent book, Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence and Place in the Digital Age, Dr. Song does more than just discuss the problems that technology, devices, and a digital ecology bring. She also introduces (probably reintroduces, is a better word) ways of being and practices that can counteract some of the uprooting that our technological practices cause. As she points out, we Christians do have a role to play, not only in recognizing problems but in bringing meaningful solutions to our world. Something else, too: Felicia does all this—in her books as well as in her interactions—with gentleness. It’s life-giving. We hope you enjoy the conversation.
Radix: Well, we are really excited to be able to talk to you. Reading your book changed some of our views, and made us happy. It also made us a little bit angry to see how people don’t seem to know how much their privacy is being eroded. You speak to how our behaviors are being influenced, and in some sense how our very humanity is being eroded. It’s not just in this book that you speak about it either. You’ve done a previous book, along with a lot of interviews, and have also taught as a sociologist for a number of years. To start off, would you tell us a little bit more about yourself and why you got interested in what you’re doing?
Felicia: Sure. So I think of myself as someone who is mainly interested in studying the social and cultural impact of our digital practices and technologies, and I’ve been interested in this question since shortly after college when I was teaching at a private school. I’m going to really date myself right now, but when I was working the first year at that private school, a boarding school, we got email.
And it was fascinating because it was the new thing. And for a school that prided itself in its community culture, it was fascinating to watch how the email was being integrated into the life of the students with no conversation, no collective discussion. It was just like, here’s this wonderful thing—let’s just go to it. And as a teacher and as a dorm parent, it was mind-boggling for me, watching these young people’s lives being changed by the ways they interacted with this new way of communicating. I was shocked we were not talking about it as a community.
It started me thinking about how we actually don’t talk about the mass media technologies that we regularly use in our society. Now I was a history major in college, so my thoughts always go to the past; so I began to think, well, has this always been around, when did this start, where did this come from? So that started a real interest in mass media and technology, asking the questions that I felt like nobody was talking about, even after we have already fully integrated certain digital practices into our life. I read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death around that time, too. I was like, wow, there’s this whole field of media studies, and, of course, Neil Postman was such a gifted writer. It was definitely inspiring.
Radix: I remember reading Neil Postman. Before that, though, I had encountered Malcolm Muggeridge’s thoughts on technology and his interaction with Marshall McLuhan’s arguments.
Felicia: Right.
Radix: I remember reading that and thinking to myself, every pastor in North America has to read this.
Felicia: McLuhan was shortly right on the heels of Postman for me. It was just life-changing for me to start conceptualizing media and technology in completely different ways.
Radix: So, I think you mentioned “digital ecology” something like forty-seven times in your book. The word ecology itself is a large one because it relates to living organisms and their surroundings, their habitats and modes of life. Would you speak about digital ecology and why it’s important for us to think about?
Felicia: Thank you for counting! It makes me nervous now for the next time I write a book: I’d better make sure I know exactly how many times I use a term [laughter]. I definitely chose the word ecology very intentionally. When most of us think about digital technologies, we think about the device: the machine in our hands, or the app, or the platform, right? Like really specific things. We conceptualize technology in terms of devices or platforms when what I’m trying to get readers to reimagine is that the device or platform is more like a portal: it’s just one facet of this much greater system. This is not just a digital landscape, but an ecology where there are intertwined, interdependent relationships. We need to start to realize that if we want to change something in our life—if we know this device has a hold on us in a certain way or that we can’t stop checking Snapchat or whatever—if we understand our relationship with technologies as a relationship within an ecology rather than a landscape—that imagery will help us better understand. For example, why is it so hard to actually make the change? Because it’s not just like, oh, you just cut something out and it doesn’t affect anything else at all.
We all know these devices and systems profoundly impact us. So I think the ecological picture that I hope to evoke in people’s minds is one that starts to get at that system. There are interrelations and a thickness of all the intertwining of things. And we’ve got to understand all the different parts of the ecology before figuring out how to make a change. Because some things can be changed and some can’t. And so that’s why I go with that term, ecology.
Radix: I really appreciate what you said in your book about the importance of imagining. In your book, you talk about how the socio-technological practices of friendship and community can disrupt, and maybe I would posit, even degrade, the way that we engage with ourselves and others. I’m just going to read a quote from your book here, where you say,
I believe that our growing dependence on our socio-technological practices of friendship and community—through the normalized uses of texting, social media, email—reflects a modern disregard for the roles that physical presence and the accompanying set of verbal and nonverbal cues play in how we come to interact with each other, how we come to love and belong to others, and how we come to becoming our own selves.
Could you unpack that for us?
Felicia: So it’s this idea that the things we do in our relationships, and even in our constructions of our own sense of self, when we are engaging in that activity via digital, that is changing our imagination. I’m borrowing here actually from a theorist Eva Illouz, who I mentioned later in the book. Essentially there is a disregard and dismissal of the presence of our bodies. I think that’s super interesting because it’s a very passive sort of attack on relationships. It’s not like the more aggressive form that others take: let’s just download our brains into the metaverse. It’s not that kind of aggressive Gnosticism. It’s much more passive. It’s like, oh, we just don’t need our bodies. You know? I think it raises interesting questions about whether relationships need to be embodied, right? And, if so, to what degree? This is deeply philosophical, theological, metaphysical stuff. What we need to consider when thinking about this is, how can we ask that question in the right way? Because our bodies matter; being embodied matters.
Historically, all the knowledge that we’ve been able to access up to this point has been relying on nonverbal cues, the presence, and the co-presence, that we experience with each other. And we can’t just scrub that away. That is all embedded into deep cultural and social understandings of the self—and it relates to how we do friendship, how we do relationships. I just find all this very interesting.
Radix: This might be a little rabbit trail, but as you’re talking about the disregard of embodiment, of presence, of incarnation, of what it means to be in the world, to feel, to touch and be touched, and so on, I’m also thinking about the really image-driven nature of social media. So in a way, it’s kind of like this deformation of what it means to be a body because we’re spending so much time on social media with perfected images. It’s interesting to ponder on what that does to our sense of embodiment.
Felicia: Yeah. Like what our perceptions of what embodiment should even be, right? I think that the image orientation of our current technologies is really interesting. McLuhan talks about how media extends our extensions. And so too, such an image-dominant orientation in our digital technologies also suggests that there are other senses being exorcized or that aren’t being given as much primacy. So then interesting questions can be raised about, well, what happens then?
I think there’s so much interesting stuff out there about the problematic nature of not just images, but how we have come to use images, to your point, about creating hyper, fantastical versions of what the human body should look like. But also, this has been happening since the dawn of photography, right? I’m thinking about some works that others have written about just what happens when you start taking pictures of things and having them represent reality. There are lots of strange distortions that can occur.
Radix: Even looking at the way photography is done right now is interesting. In a certain way, with the non-digital kind, you can only represent certain colors at a certain time. You can’t have bright red, bright blue, bright green all in the same frame because, from the physics of light, there are limitations. Now, however, when we look at so many pictures, whether they are of people or landscapes or traveling, it’s not really real; or at least, they are a misrepresentation of reality. I was reading about the effect on kids of looking at blue screens and seeing that kind of false representation. The point was that kids are more interested in looking at and through the digital screen because, in a way, that’s more exciting. But then, going back to what you were saying with the lack of focus on other senses, even, for example, kids going outside: I think it was Andy Crouch who was talking about going out with his kids, not just to a manicured park but to a small representation of nature, like a meadow where there’s actual nature. It’s full. It’s real. Somewhere you can engage your senses in a more replete way and have a better grasp of the reality of the world.
Felicia: Yeah. Think about the generations of digital users who don’t have a stable memory or set of pre-screen experiences, right? I think there are huge questions about what their sense of reality is or will be. Simply look at studies about kids who live in inner cities who don’t get to be in spaces where there are a lot of trees and grass and wildlife, and how that impacts them. Kids who don’t have access to programs that encourage the arts or music are disadvantaged. I think what’s interesting and frustrating is that there’s all this research and effort already being done in other spheres that recognize what happens when you give someone a very reduced or distorted version of what the fullness of life can be.
So I say to that, hey, look, we’re already doing this good work over here. We’re already creating programs that bring kids that don’t get to enjoy the outdoors into summer camps to be outside and experience trees and so forth. That is tied into what we should be doing in the public schools. Like, why are we putting so many screens in front of them? It’s all kind of mind-boggling to me because it always seems to be working at cross efforts. I think, again, that goes back to this culturally embedded belief that technology represents progress; that technology represents human advancement. And so, the push is to put it in front of people, to get it in our bodies. Because whatever it is, it’s all going to be good. And I know it’s not that simplistic; there are many more sophisticated arguments to make, but I think at the gut level, at least some in our culture have an intuition about the longer-term negative effects that technology might have in the world.
Radix: On the topic of progress, George Grant, a Canadian philosopher, used this term: “intimations of deprival.” It’s this idea that we know things aren’t as they should be. With that said, I wonder what you think the role of educators could be to improve things? I hear from friends who have kids that their kids don’t want to be outside or go into the real world. Not interested. So how does a parent overcome that initial resistance to breaking free from digital reality’s grasp on us?
Felicia: The parenting questions are always so challenging. I really do believe that when we as human beings get to experience something that is truly beautiful, truly transformative, experientially meaningful, we recognize it. You know, we awaken. Maybe there are lots of layers of resistance that we need to get past, but I am reminded of a quote from C.S Lewis about being too content to play with the mud pies when we’ve been invited to go to the shore. When we actually let ourselves go to the shore, we come to realize, hey! why was I just playing with those mud pies?
I do think that it is challenging when it comes to kids because they haven’t had as much life experience or memories to draw from. However, I don’t think that it takes very long to introduce them to the remedy. I mean, I teach college students and we have a version of this conversation. Every time I teach a class on the internet and society I ask them, when you grow old and you turn your shoulder and you look back on your life, what are you going to want to see? Everyone says, I want to see time with family and friends, I want to have traveled, and have accomplished this-or-meaningful-that. And I always say to them, notice that none of you were like, oh, I want to look back and see a lifetime of scrolling on TikTok or measure my worth by how many followers I had. Nobody says that. Right? It sounds foolish to even bring it up. But by the time they’re twenty-one, or even eighteen, they know.
And so, the question is—and that’s what I ask them—well, what are you going to do about it? If you want to look back on a life like you say you want to have, what are you going to be doing now to build that life? What are the habits you’re doing now that are going to get you to all those awesome memories?
I love the phrase you used earlier, of intimations of deprival. I got that right?
Radix: Yup.
Felicia: As a society, I think we are already sniffing out potential problems with technology, you know? From people going gonzo over every single technological thing, to now having a growing skepticism. People are saying, hey, maybe this isn’t so great.
This is where it’s very interesting for people of faith who are Christians to look at practices of meditation that have become fairly mainstream. I mean, my kids in public school are being taught practices and meditation. Sure, it’s stripped of all the roots that it tends to draw on, but there’s this general sense in people of like, oh man, we’re overwhelmed, we’re stressed, we’re anxious. And the digital isn’t helping.
This is where, to me, the Christian Church can say, hey, we have good stuff in our traditions and in our theology. We just need to figure out how it applies in the current context and how to offer it into the world in such a way that it isn’t presented like a bait-and-switch kind of thing, or, like, if you do this thing then we’re going to drag you into our church. We need to be wise.
Radix: I so appreciated your emphasis on the importance of liturgy and its connection with awakening and transformation. You spend a lot of time on the importance of liturgy in your book, how it shapes our desires and helps transform us. I know others, like James K. A. Smith, have written on this too, but could you talk more on the importance of liturgy?
Felicia: I also read James K. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom. And I appreciated how he articulated his understanding of liturgy. So much resonated with my personal experience.
What, I think, clenched it for me, and I mentioned this in the book, was how I grew up in my faith journey within a fairly Baptist tradition. You know, where liturgy was just something those other people did, over there. Then, by and by, I found myself attending an Episcopal church. At first, I found myself completely lost and out of sync with the worship liturgy every Sunday. But still finding solace in it at the time of my life. Then, years later, I realized that I had completely become transformed in my own understanding and my own experience of spirituality through the liturgy.
My imagination of who God is had broadened. The things that I want to do with my body when I worship now, like wanting to kneel and bow, are things that I never would’ve imagined desiring years ago. And so, from personal experience, I was just fascinated by like, wow, how did I get here? The changes that had taken place were not intentional. You know, it’s not like when I started going to the Episcopal church, I was like, I want to become X or whatever, or like, I want to have a different vision of God. It wasn’t anything like that. It was just like, hey, I’m just going to show up on Sundays and do this stuff. Because I really need it right now in my life. And I just kept showing up. And I think the “just show up” aspect of liturgy, which musicians and athletes understand in their context, has a kind of transformative quality. When we practice with our bodies, day in and out, something penetrates or gets enmeshed in our molecules.
I know there are lots of criticisms that people launch about Smith’s work on liturgy, but there’s something very compelling about it. I think it’s a vision of liturgy and the way that practices work in our bodies that’s very sociological.
Radix: Something that strikes me is your invitation to beauty, true freedom, meaning, and purpose. Rather than merely pointing out vices, devices, and habits that need to be stopped, you invite us into a fullness of life.
It makes me think of something you said in your book. You state that,
“Maybe what we need is not so much more knowledge about technology but more knowledge and understanding about being human—in particular, what it means that being human is an experience that is situated in time and in place within our corporeal bodies and in our relationship with the divine and our neighbor.”
Could you tell us more about what it means to be human? Because if we know what it means to be human, then we’ll know how to deal with our devices.
Felicia: I like how you’re bringing together the freedom theme, and then that particular quote. I think what’s interesting to me about our digital ecology is how it prescribes a particular vision of what it means to be human. It says to be human is to put witty, sexy images out there that will yield a lot of attention—not to mention to constantly be “on” and responsive to whatever is coming. When you look at the implied visions of being human in that digital context, it’s about efficiency; it’s about attention; it’s a ceaseless chasing. And so, one of the things I like to talk about is how our technologies frame freedom in terms of being disinhibited or freed from constraints and limitations. So that we can do whatever, whenever, and however we want. I think there is, in Christianity, a much deeper notion of freedom for human beings. Not a freedom from these particular constraints that are often time and space-oriented, and freedom from other people’s kind of norms and expectations, but rather a freedom to be wholly yourself. Because Christianity is about wholeness, right?
Radix: Yes!
Felicia: There’s a fullness in Christianity that is positive from the beginning. A kind of glory that needs to shine. And so I think it’s that freedom to be fully who we are, both in our glory and also in all of our shadow sides, and yet still be loved, and know that we belong. Having that opens up another, deeper freedom within us.
And you know, when you just sit down and talk to someone about real freedom, I feel like you can see it in people’s eyes. If you actually say, hey, this is something that is possible, people are receptive. In many cases, it was just never something they even entertained, or they thought it was too good to be true. Or, maybe it was just something that they had given up on. You know, maybe they had hoped for it when they were younger, and then, for a variety of reasons, life beat them down in certain ways so that they just gave up. That’s where I think, as people of faith, we need to ask ourselves the question, “What is the gospel really for?” I think there’s a lot of room for us to move as Christians there.
Radix: Thank you for inviting us to think more about such things. As I was listening to you, I was noticing collective words in phrases, like, us seeing in the other person’s eyes, hearing it in their voice, talking to them, listening to them. It’s a very relational thing that you’re talking about here. You say something in your book like, “I realize that few people are changed by reading a book alone.” You go on to say that it’s by conversations, it’s by doing things together—that causes meaningful change. Ultimately, we simply cannot do it alone. We are changed together. If we are saved, we are saved together. You also talk about the importance of the Church, and that part of the long-term solution to our digital discontent is connected to the Church. We’re not meant to do it alone; we’re meant to do it together. And not just that we have to, but that we get to!
I go to an Anglican church now and I’m very drawn to their focus on the importance of community as different from the kind of pietistic background that was more like, just be friends with Jesus. I think Jesus doesn’t want to be your only friend. I think Jesus wants you to have other friends, and he wants us to have a community. And so, I really like your emphasis in the book on the need for community and the Church.
Felicia: Well, that’s the sticking point, right? The pietistic tendency toward individualism and western society’s own roots of individualism have penetrated our western consciousness in profoundly deep ways. I think that’s where Christianity and the ancient Church model has much wisdom for us to glean. You can’t get around the group thing, even if you don’t like it! It seems to me that the New Testament is saying that the Church is actually the hands and feet of Jesus. How that all works out, I don’t understand completely. Especially in this day and age. It’s hard, you know? I mean, I want to acknowledge that for most people the last couple years with Covid have been hard. It’s been hard to be in the Church with all that’s been going on, certainly in the United States, you know, with the politics and the race stuff. But the Church is supposed to be like the Trinity, right? I mean, the Trinity is relational and the Church is supposed to be, too.
Radix: Yes, yes.
Felicia: And again, I think it’s the kind of claim that is hard to believe when you haven’t had the chance to taste it. I want to acknowledge that a lot of folks haven’t had the chance to taste really good, healthy, genuine community. That’s grievous. However, I think for those of us who have had the good fortune of being able to taste genuine, true fellowship and community, there’s nothing else like it. There is a kind of generative power there that goes beyond oneself. I. So when it comes to making change to experience genuine freedom, I do think it has to be within the context of the collective for it to work.
Radix: Do you have any suggestions on what the Church can do to help increase that?
Felicia: You know, I don’t know what the next step for the Church should be. It does feel like at least in North America, with the Church having just gone through the hard part of the pandemic and being thrust into an online space and doing online church stuff, and now with people going back to in-person, it just strikes me as an incredible opportunity. Just like it is for companies and workplaces whose employees had worked remotely, and now many of them are re-evaluating how they should run their organizations. So too, it’s an opportunity for the Church to think about what we are doing on Sunday mornings. Like, why should we ask these people to come here to a physical building when they can just go online and watch something that, more than likely, for the greater majority of people, is a better sermon than they would get in their local church? Because there’s probably someone out there that’s more talented.
I think it’s an opportunity though. And I ask my students about this. I ask them, what would get you to church? The answers are interesting. First, they come out with all the great answers, like food; and I say, yes, actually there are traditions of food in church, we can do that. Then, they also talk about interacting more. They’re like, we always have to just sit there and listen to someone talk at us. They say that they want to be interacting; that’s what would make them go. That’s interesting to me because they are getting at both the embodied corporeal nature of our humanness and also getting at the relational aspects.
People are hungry for that; people want to be with other people. And I think that’s kind of part of the fundamental DNA of Christianity. I think there are just a lot of interesting, scary, maybe risky questions that churches can be asking themselves right now. But it might be the time to try on some different things.
Radix: Right. It’ll be interesting to see … and hear, and feel, and taste what happens.
Felicia: Yeah. Right? Totally.
Radix: On a slightly different topic, I love it when there are different leads in books that can be followed. So, in your book, I read some names that I was familiar with, such as Charles Taylor, Martin Buber, Abraham Heschel, and some others. And then, because I recognized those, my faith and trust in you grew. So when you mentioned other names, I thought, oh, I’ll write those ones down. Anyway, I really appreciate that you peppered lots of great names and great thinkers from a plurality of places throughout your book. Would you give us some names of books or authors that really affected the way that you think? Not necessarily just about technology, but ones that are important to you, in general.
Felicia: You know, one book that always comes to mind is Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. I read it at the right time in my life. I was in my early or mid-twenties, and Dillard’s beautiful writing opened up the natural world for me in a way. I grew up in the suburbs, so didn’t spend a lot of time outside. What she could see in the natural world was just so gorgeous to me. I think her sensibility really formed me.
Maybe more recently is a book by the Black theologian Howard Thurman, who wrote Jesus and the Disinherited. It’s a short book that people famously say was the book that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had in his pocket during much of the civil rights movement. This book really changed the way I think about who Jesus is in profound ways. I teach it every year now. It really makes us think about who Jesus came for. I was also deeply formed by C.S Lewis’s Space Trilogy.
Recently I’ve been reading Reconciling All Things by Chris Rice and Emmanuel Katongole, which explores the nature of reconciliation beyond the usual kind of tropes. And the authors are just so real. I really, really appreciate that.
I actually really like reading children’s books!
Radix: Oh, cool.
Felicia: One of my favorite authors is Kate DiCamillo. I think she’s the most recognizable for her book, The Tale of Despereaux. But you know, almost anything she writes is great. She has this sort of southern goth style. There’s just poignancy in all her stories and they just always make me cry; they’re so humane. They have deeply humane portraits of children and young people dealing with very real things. She is able to gently move the reader through hard, hard things and resolve them in beautiful ways. Those are some of the names that come to mind.
Radix: Thank you for sharing. I really appreciate it. One of my favorite questions to ask—because I believe that pastors and clergy do still have some formative voice, though it’s waning—is: if you were able to speak to all the pastors, and you had their attention, and they had to listen to you with a smile on their face because if people are smiling, they’re more receptive—what would you tell them?
Felicia: I’d want to tell them that issues of digital technology are not simply youth group-exclusive issues. Technology is not simply a problem for young people, or a topic to be broached occasionally during Sunday school or that one sermon on the ills of pornography. I think that if you’re interested in spiritual formation in the twenty-first century, you have to get a grasp on technology and what it’s doing and how it’s forming us. One has to preach regularly about it. Not in a topical way, but in a much more natural way. This is just part of our life and way of being now. We need to start thoughtfully and more directly engaging with these pervasive digital practices that we have with each other in our workplace, in our leisure, and in most areas of our life.
Obviously, it’s not a one-size-fits-all. I’m also not suggesting pastors set up a bunch of rules that the whole church has to follow in some legalistic way. All of that’s horrible. What I am talking about is spiritual formation, or discipleship, or whatever term you want to use. The point is that we simply have to have direct discussions about the ways that technologies are very much part of the mix for all of us now and are forming us. Spiritual formation and discipleship are not electives, or something nice. It’s more like, no, I don’t like how my life is going, and here’s this other path that is open that I could try.
Radix: Spiritual formation is not an elective! Nice.
Felicia: Yeah, because you’re doing it anyway. You’re already doing it, but you’re not calling it what it is. The truth is we are all being formed by something.
Radix: Yes! Okay, last question: we’ve mentioned before how much we appreciate your beautiful, hope-filled, joy-filled, life-filled, and life-affirming way of talking. May we ask, what does hope mean to you? What is your hope grounded in, and how do you think that we could maybe nurture our hope in how we see the world around us?
Felicia: I’m going to reference the book I mentioned earlier, Reconciling All Things, because they talk about hope. What’s so brilliant about the way they write about hope is that basically, you don’t get to hope until you’ve lamented. Even their chapter on hope is preceded by a chapter on lament. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. I think very often we get those things confused or conflated. Hope is something that one cultivates in the face of really bearing witness to genuine loss and facing what has gone wrong and lamenting and grieving that.
But then, and this is the faith part, really, we can also declare that we think it can be different; it can be better than this. So I think of hope as something that’s grounded. And I’m going to use some pretty Christian language in this part because I haven’t worked out personal language for it well enough yet. But I think of my hope as being grounded in the power of Jesus Christ’s resurrection, which opened up the restoration of creation. I know that’s pretty Christianese, but I think it is a faith that things can be different because of this person Jesus Christ, who died and resurrected and has broken the spell, to use a Chronicles of Narnia term.
I believe that there is new life, and life that we can see both in ourselves, in other people, and in the world around us. I believe that we’re invited to participate in that. As people of faith, it’s part of our call to participate in that restoration. That’s kind of how I think about hope.
Radix: What a replete answer. Thank you again so very much for this lovely time, and for your book.
Felicia: Thank you. It’s been a real pleasure to hang out with you guys, and I really appreciate your enthusiasm. It’s always really nice.