Smartphones

About three years ago, I bought my first iPhone. It was the 3G model and I was very excited about it, drowning in the Apple hysteria that has held the world hostage ever since. And up until about a month ago when the phone packed it in I was very happy with it. I used it for Twitter, did all my emailing with it and had the Bible on it which is always handy.

Now, when it broke I was gutted, I mean, how do you exist in the modern world without all these things and much more in your pocket at all times?

Well, I am currently using the phone I had previously, a Sony Ericsson which does none of the things previously mentioned. It texts, it phones and it has a reasonable camera, but this is about it (except for a truly addictive mini golf game). And I have to say that I haven't missed the other things one bit. Not only that, but on Saturday night I decided that I was done with smartphones for the foreseeable future. 


You see, I have just returned from Summer Madness (tenth year...depressing thought, no?) with over fifty young people from our church, and it was an incredible time of fellowship together. There was incredible worship to take part in, some wonderfully gifted preachers brought challenging and through-provoking messages, and most importantly God sent His Spirit down and touched a lot of people. Lives were changed. Brilliant, yeah? And yet, people didn't get as much as they could have. Why? Because of smartphones. Over the four days spent at Glenarm Castle there were eight main meetings. Each of these meetings lasted maybe two hours. Within this time there was a talk, probably thirty to forty minutes long. In every one of those talks I looked round at different points and saw at least half of the young people in our group sitting with their iPhone or their BlackBerry in between their knees trying to be discreet, checking FaceBook or something else. And as you looked over the rest of the crowd of people there, it was exactly the same. I stood up at one point and there was a sea of little lights, a couple of inches in size, as people sat on their phone while the person on the stage tried to reach them with scriptural message. 


Does this not worry us? Is it not a horrifying thought that we cannot focus for half an hour in today's society without caving into the need to check our phone? Worse still we readily give the phone a priority over the Word of God. 


The irony of it was that the theme of the week was Fashion Gods, with focuses on consumerism and being countercultural. And yet almost every member of our group had paid the high cost to have one of these phones in their possession, just the way society tells them they must. And don't get me wrong, I had one for years, but this week has changed my view on them in a big way. 


As usual, all opinions welcome!