The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 53 – Felicia Wu Song

Episode 53: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

In this episode, Dr. Jeff interviews sociologist Felicia Wu Song about her book, Restless Devices, and the profound impact of technology on modern life. Song argues that digital devices are not neutral tools but are designed to capture attention and shape users’ inner lives, relationships, and connection to God. She explains how algorithms create personalized, filtered realities that can lead to anxiety and division.

As a countermeasure, Song advocates for increased self-awareness and the intentional cultivation of spiritual practices, such as contemplation and finding quiet moments in daily routines. She emphasizes the importance of reclaiming time for rest and genuine, slow-paced human connection to foster empathy and a healthier spiritual life, moving away from a culture of constant productivity.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Dr. Jeff Show Podcast. You can get this podcast on Apple, Google, Spotify, Edifi, Liftable, wherever you get your podcasts. Please review the podcast, tell your friends about it because we want this to grow. On this show, I interview major thought leaders from many fields of influence to show how our worldview changes everything.

My guest today is a sociologist who shares how our digital devices are designed to capture our attention and how they shape our relationships to time, other people, and to God. It’s a profoundly important conversation, and I hope that you will join me in welcoming Felicia Wu Song to the Dr. Jeff Show. Felicia Wu Song, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show today.

Felicia Wu Song (00:52):
Thanks so much. It’s great to be here.

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:55):
Well, we were trying to record a little bit earlier. We ended up with these technological problems and I thought, what a perfect illustration of exactly what we’re going to talk about because you’ve been writing on technology based on a class that you’ve been teaching on internet and society to college students. And this book that you’ve written, Restless Devices, is fantastic. There are lots of books out there that talk about big tech tyranny and so forth, but you’ve taken a really deep approach to it about how our technology relates to our inner lives and how we connect with one another in society. So I’m really looking forward to our conversation.

Felicia Wu Song (01:35):
Thank you. Likewise.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:37):
Tell us a little bit about the class that you teach and how your students have been interacting with technology in the years that you’ve been teaching it.

Felicia Wu Song (01:46):
Yeah, sure. So it’s a class called Internet and Society. I’ve been teaching it for, actually, several decades now. But what’s been interesting about the class is seeing how the students have changed just as much as the technologies. And what I’ve seen, especially in the last few years, is that there’s just been an increasing awareness of, kind of, the downsides of technologies that a lot of my students early on just didn’t really experience or see from their own lives.

But I would say in the last four or five years, I have more and more students who come to class, who begin the class already telling me, “Hey, I’m feeling really tired. I’m stressed out by the kind of demands I feel put upon me through my digital practices, and I don’t know what to do about it. I just kind of feel stuck.” And so that was one of the main reasons I wanted to write this book.

Dr. Jeff Myers (02:51):
Felicia, there are so many angles that I want to focus on, but one thing, it’s something that you claim and illustrate in the book that I think a lot of people haven’t really thought through. And that is that technology is not neutral. We’ve always thought, “Oh, well, the phone is a phone, a stethoscope is a stethoscope. These tools are neutral. It’s just if we use them in a bad way that they end up being bad.” But you have a different perspective on that, and I’d like for you to explain it to our audience.

Felicia Wu Song (03:21):
Yeah. So I think it’s important for us to realize how technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, right? It’s not just kind of floating out there in the cosmos and it doesn’t come to us just kind of dropped out of the heavens, right? But technologies are produced, they’re designed, they’re conceived of within a society, and they get implemented, marketed to us within a society.

And we all know that in a society, it’s filled with values and meaning and priorities, visions of the good life, visions of what it means to be human. All of those things are interacting with the production and the uses of our technologies, right? And so there’s lots of ways in which if we just think our technologies are merely neutral, we might be missing out in big ways and understanding why things are actually happening the way they are.

Dr. Jeff Myers (04:22):
Tell us a little bit about why things are happening the way they are. And actually, I’ll start with a funny story that you tell in the book where you tell a story of you and your daughter Googling the same search term and coming up with dramatically different results. You’d Googled the term morsel and your feed came up with advertisements for dog food. Hers came up with advertisements for chocolate chips. And I think the illustration was really powerful.

My wife Stephanie and I were chatting about it because when we Google something, we think that everybody in the world is going to get the same result that we are getting if they had Googled that same term. But the truth is we’re being served information in a very particular universe based on our previous interests. And so we aren’t nearly as well versed or neutral as we think we are even in our searches. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Felicia Wu Song (05:19):
Yeah. So those search results, whether we’re using Google or whatever engine we’re using, they’re coming through an algorithm, right? The results we’re getting, we tend to think, oh, it’s just scooping from all that’s out there in the internet and it’s just giving me a pure reflection of what people are saying or what’s going on in the world when in fact there’s an equation, right?

There’s an algorithm that has been building around all the different data that we’ve been giving over to these companies about what we’re interested in, what clicks, who we’re following, right? All of those are piecing together to give us results that they know we will be interested in, right? It’s a predictive model. And so we might be thinking when we type in London, that it’s just giving us the same London that I’m looking at, you’re looking at. It might actually be really different because of all of our prior clicks, right?

(06:26):
And so I think it definitely makes us think about, “Okay, well, what is my perception of the world?” Is it coming through actually a really small filter rather than the wider, right? Which puts a lot of burdens actually on us if we start realizing that to have to search pretty intentionally for lots of different sources to get a bigger or a fuller picture of what’s going on.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:58):
Well, I think it’s interesting, but it’s alarming too because you think I had no idea how easily manipulated I could be by any organization that wants to give me what it wants me to see rather than what’s actually going on.

Felicia Wu Song (07:16):
Yeah. Well, and I think that’s where we’ve been living through this pandemic, right? And so many of us have had to go online to know what’s going on, right? We’ve been stuck in our homes, we’ve been constrained. And in many ways, I’m really thankful for what the digital has allowed us to continue in our lives, but the downside is that we’ve grown to, even more, rely on our screens for information rather than maybe even just going out the door and talking to someone, right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (07:58):
Yeah.

Felicia Wu Song (07:58):
Talking to someone about what they actually think or what they saw or what’s going on in the world and to get some verification, right? To get some other source points that aren’t just coming through the algorithm and that takes work. I know it takes work and lots of us are like, “Oh, who has the time for that?” But it is, we do live in a world where if we only rely on Google or Instagram or Snapchat to actually tell us what’s going on in the world, it is going to give us a filtered view, right?

And I always talk to my students about encouraging them to, “Hey, you’ve got to look at different sources.” There are news sources that are different and it’s valuable even to look at what other countries are saying about what’s happening in the United States, right? All of those different perspectives are so helpful in giving us a sense of, “Oh, there’s actually a lot of different ways to look at what’s happening here.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (09:14):
Yeah, that’s really good. So to read widely, to look at information from the perspective that you might not ordinarily look at, and then yeah, that’s really good. Well, it also occurs to me that if I’m being served up things through algorithms.

(09:33):
And let’s say I’m online and I’m really upset about something, I’m not being my best self, right? I’m being a lesser version of me. And the algorithm then just sort of directs me and says, “You think you’re angry, wait till we give you this article from somebody else who’s really angry and you should be angry about what they’re angry about too.”

And all of a sudden I get amped up and anxious. I get this feeling of depression and I know so many in our audience were like, “Yes, I have felt this. I have experienced that anxiety and the depression that have come from that.” What’s the way out for us? And I just love to hear some of your counsel.

Felicia Wu Song (10:19):
Yeah. Oh, that’s a big question, Dr. Jeff. I think the first thing is to actually, exactly what you’re saying is actually to grow in self-awareness that that is actually happening, right? Most of the time we don’t even realize it’s happening, right? We are just on the screen and we are spiraling down and our emotions, like you said, they’re just getting drug along as those algorithms are dragging us.

One of the things I’ve actually started thinking a lot about these days is, and I write about this in the book, is just how it is that what habits we have and what physical routines we have, what we do with our bodies actually trains us and forms us in ways that we don’t even see. And so I’ve started wondering about the amount of time we actually spend reading about what’s going on in the world, thinking about it versus the amount of time we spend, if we’re living in a place, I know it’s winter, a lot of people can’t go outside, but if you’re living in a place where you can go outside and you actually touch the leaves, be in nature, right?

(11:43):
Yeah. Or you go and you talk to another human being, or you might actually read your Bible, you might actually pray, right? Yeah. How much time are we spending actually being formed? This is about formation through our screens versus all these other practices that through all of humanity people have done, right? They’ve spent time outside, they’ve talked to other human beings, they’ve practiced the spiritual disciplines, right?

And so one of the things I’ve been wondering about more is just how we can be more intentional, right? More intentional about what we are devoting our attention and our spirits to, right? And even asking ourselves the questions, “Well, why is it that I feel like I need to read the news constantly throughout the day?” Like what is that about? Is it about like, “I need to keep up. I’m afraid something’s going to happen.” And maybe when we discover, “Oh yeah, I am afraid.”

(12:51):
“I’m anxious about this. This makes me upset.” Well, what do I do with that? Well, if you’re a person of faith, arguably it’s not just, read more, right? That’s not the prescription. We don’t read ourselves into a solution for that anxiety, but we’re actually supposed to bring it to the Lord, right? We’re supposed to bring it and serve it up to him and be like, “Lord, this is scary to me,” right? “This is frustrating to me. This is upsetting to me.”

(13:21):
“What am I supposed to do?” And there’s so many wonderful models in the scriptures of people who’ve done that, right? And if it’s wisdom that we need, if it’s assurance or peace that we need, right? We all know now we’re not going to find it through social media.

Dr. Jeff Myers (13:41):
Right. That’s right.

Felicia Wu Song (13:42):
And so that’s why I really do believe that the Christian faith is just so rich with paths that we just haven’t explored sufficiently, right? There’s so many answers through the ages that the desert fathers and mothers have demonstrated to us that we have so much to learn from, and that we might actually be in a place in our society now because we’re so tired, we’re so freaked out that we might actually turn to them and say, “Hmm, maybe that contemplation thing, that contemplative tradition has, there’s something to it. Maybe there’s something to just being quiet and stilling ourselves, just even if it’s like 10 minutes,” right? There might be something there.

Dr. Jeff Myers (14:33):
It’s a point that you brought up in the book that, and I’d always thought of this as a net positive about technology, is that it makes us very efficient with how we spend our time. But you point out that we don’t always, it’s not necessarily a good thing to always be efficient with our time. I’m trying to think of how you phrase it here. Okay, so I’m going to read a passage from the book back to you. You said, “So the great irony is the more we demand our brains to attend to being productive, the less our brains are able to grow us as persons in key areas of identity, construction and empathy.”

And then you say, “This doesn’t even address the more widely known contention, that sometimes it is only when nothing is happening, that something can actually happen. Sometimes it is only in our repose or cessation of activity that we actually come to realize solutions to puzzles that have stumped us or experienced joys that we’ve been running too fast to even receive.” That’s a powerful statement. How do you help your students do that?

Felicia Wu Song (15:54):
Well, at least in our class, one of the exercises that I do is an exercise that happens kind of two thirds into the semester where everyone’s like fully in the swaying of their classes, their activities, and everyone’s kind of getting a little tired, right? And the end is not quite in sight yet, and we’re all just feeling a little frazzled, right? And so they come to class and I actually tell them, “Hey, we’re going to take 15 minutes.”

And I happen to teach at a place where it is chronically beautiful and the weather’s chronically amazing. So I have a luxury here to do this, but I tell them, “I want you to go outside. We’re going to spend 15 minutes, go find a tree, patch of grass, shade, sun, whatever floats your boat.” And I have them go outside with the sheet of paper that has questions for them that says, “What’s been distracting me?”

(17:08):
“What’s the noise that keeps filling my life?” Ask them to kind of reflect on it, just stop for 15 minutes. And that exercise is always, I’m always kind of amazed by how powerful it is. I mean, students come back and they’ll write about it at the end of the semester. They’re like, “Not only is it that they didn’t have to do a lecture for 15 minutes, but they’re like, you gave us 15 minutes, I never do that for myself.”

(17:43):
And it’s not just our students, it’s us, it’s all of us, right? We’re in this society that tells us that to be a good human being, to be a successful human being, we all have to just be on the go twenty four seven productivity now, now, now all the time. But when you read the scriptures and you explore the Christian heritage, it’s like, that is not the story, right? That is not the story of what human beings are meant to be. You see that in even God’s example of the Sabbath, right?

And so I just think our, we’ve kind of been whipped into this mentality of like, “I’ve got to keep up or else I’m going to get left behind. I’m going to miss out.” But the truth of the matter is we’re actually missing out on a lot of other things when we’re not stopping because there’s so much of life that we’re not actually letting sink into ourselves.

(18:51):
Whether it’s the negative or the positive. And I think we intuitively understand this, young and old, right? When we look at the good times in our lives or the things that have really been meaningful, things have usually been kind of slow, whether you’re like hanging out with friends at the dinner table and you’re just, you’ve got hours and you’re not looking at your watch, you’re not running off somewhere, those are the best times.

And so I’m just fully convinced that when we give ourselves more of those times and we remember them, I think we just forget, right? We tend to forget. If we intentionally chase down those times, devote ourselves, invest in those times, we’re going to just be hungry for more because that’s who God created us to be.

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:44):
You’ve expressed it so beautifully and it creates a longing in my heart to want to have more of those times. And I guess I don’t usually reflect a lot personally during these episodes, but I’m thinking I’ve made it an intentional goal this year to spend more time with my friends. I’ve set aside time to go skiing or hunting or whatever and just be together. It’s almost like we have a chance to reclaim something that’s really fantastic and grand, but we’ve got to take that device and set it down for it to happen.

Felicia Wu Song (20:26):
Yeah. I think that’s right. And it does take some intention. I mean, the world’s not going to give it to us on a silver platter. You kind of have to fight for it and be committed to protecting it and that I really do think of it as a protection, right? That there is a sacredness to the time that we get to enjoy with the people we love. There is a sacredness to the times that we get to be in a place that we really cherish and that if we don’t intentionally protect it, kind of box out time, square out space, to make them beautiful, to live fully into them, they’re just always going to evaporate. It’s just never going to happen.

Dr. Jeff Myers (21:25):
Yeah. You mentioned this practice of contemplation, and it occurs to me that I’ve read about that before, I’ve tried it at different times, but I wonder how many people are watching or listening to this right now who are sort of saying, “Okay, I draw a blank when you talk about that.” Give me an example of, so you’ve got your Bible in front of you, you’re trying to read scripture. What does contemplation look like in that moment from your perspective?

Felicia Wu Song (22:00):
Yeah. Well, I think it could look like a lot of different things. For someone like me, I’m someone whose brain never stops going, constantly chewing on anything and everything, right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:18):
Yep.

Felicia Wu Song (22:19):
And so for me, when I am praying or with scripture, the challenge is to quiet my brain, to not analyze the scripture, to not be thinking about all the people I should be praying for, all the things I should be praying for, but the challenge is actually to quiet, set it all side. It’s not that those things aren’t important or valuable, but that there is a need, especially with the way that I’m kind of geared to actually set out space where there is silence and I’m not trying to actually achieve a kind of spiritual whatever I think I’m doing, right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:06):
Yeah.

Felicia Wu Song (23:08):
But to rest and to actually trust that God’s presence is already here, right? Like I don’t need to summon God, right? Like I don’t need to stir up some spiritual state to get God to be here with me, right? No, God is here already. The Holy Spirit already wants to tell me something, right? How do I quiet myself, rest in his love enough to be free to hear, right? And that can be 10 minutes, half an hour. Half an hour is a long time for me to try to be silent in my brain.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:59):
But the point is, you don’t have to wait around till you’ve got a half a day for a prayer.

Felicia Wu Song (24:03):
Exactly. Yeah. We tend to think, “Oh, I got to go on this retreat. I’ve got to get to the mountain, whatever.” I actually think, for me, and I kind of write about this a little bit in the book. I actually find, yes, there’s the prayer closet time, but I actually find driving to be a really interesting time. If I’m on my own, not with my kids or whoever else I might be driving, but if I’m driving and I intentionally turn everything off, music, podcasts, everything.

(24:40):
And I’m just driving, I’m driving a familiar road so I’m not having to figure out directions and whatnot, I actually find that time to be really sacred because there is a lot of silence that I experience in that 10 minute commute to a supermarket or whatever it is that makes me aware of, oh, either what’s going on in my mind or what burdens I’m carrying or how I need to breathe my way into some rest, some stillness, right?

I know for some folks who like to run, it’s running, getting out there, walking, right? It doesn’t have to just be by your bedside at the desk. I think there’s lots of different opportunities that suit our different lives that we can be experimenting with and seeing, where are the little pockets that we can reconnect with God, right? Who is truly always with us and all around us.

Dr. Jeff Myers (25:51):
Yeah. This is powerful. It occurs to me, just based on some of the stories you tell in your book, that a lot of the people who’ve invented the technology we use and the social media apps that we use have practices that are similar to this. They don’t let their kids use Facebook. They do not, they turn their technology off at a certain time of day, and they actually have some kind of an app that makes it go off, so they literally can’t access it. What do you think they discovered alone? Did they sort of figure this out? “Hey, the product I’m selling is bad for people,” or did they just realize, “No, as a human, it could be helpful to me, but I need space as well.”

Felicia Wu Song (26:41):
Yeah, I think most of their stories are about how they have seen the technological addiction around them with their colleagues in the work culture that they see. They know how the platform works. They know how those buttons are designed to, kind of, physiological, they’re designed. So we’re like malls that are just like to a flame. We just cannot avoid it. Our neurological wiring, our psychological tendencies, our human longings for connection, they know it because they designed it, they put it in there and they’re like, “We know this stuff is powerful.”

And so yeah, no way am I going to let my kids have this. And yeah, I need some rest, so I got to turn this thing off. So yeah, I think it’s really instructive when we see that the very makers of our technology are putting up little rules and barriers and intentions into their lives that they don’t tell us they’re doing. It doesn’t come with the package when we open up the iPhone. It doesn’t say that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:57):
It doesn’t say the person who invented this thinks this is a really bad idea and they are not using it right now.

Felicia Wu Song (28:04):
Yeah. Don’t let your kid use this. Yeah. They don’t say that, which I personally find incredibly upsetting, that they don’t tell us that when they themselves see how impoverishing and even destructive it can be. I mean, and again, I think it’s really different for different people. We react to technology, we react to social media and different apps in different ways.

And so a lot of this, I think, requires a little bit of intention in reflecting on oneself and being aware of, “Hey, what is it that keeps me looking?” And a lot of times that brings up hard stuff, right? It’s insecurity, it’s anger, it’s certain kinds of longings we have, and that’s vulnerable stuff, but I think that gets us right into the heart of our relationship with God. And so that’s why I feel like for people of faith within our church communities, like technology, this conversation should be front and center because this is really about discipleship in the end, right?

(29:26):
When we’re talking about insecurity and anger and longings, that’s our being, right? And that’s the part of ourselves that the Lord wants to free and bring salvation to, right? That’s the work. And so, I appreciate conversations like this that we’re having, that we get to talk about this because I think this is what we need to be doing.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:53):
Yeah. As we get ready to close, I always like to try to think of how to make it as practical as possible. You mentioned a statistic in the book from Sherry Turkel, who’s written a lot about the effect of technology, that over the last few years when we’ve been using social media more, there’s been a 40% decline in empathy. So people are, I don’t know exactly how to read that statistic, but they’re almost half as likely to care for other people personally and see life from other people’s perspectives. It’s almost as if we’re treating others as objects rather than as persons.

And everybody watching or listening knows that’s a problem, but we are going to go home at the end of the day and be with those we love or be on a phone call with people we love or be at a church with people. Is there a way to be more mindful? What should we be thinking about and how do we reclaim that practice of caring for other people to the point of being able to see things from their perspective?

Felicia Wu Song (31:05):
That’s a good one. That’s a good question. When it comes to empathy, some of us might be able to read our way into empathy. We might pick up a book about a group of people that are living an experience that’s just radically different from ours. And we might be able to read ourselves into a place of like, “Oh, I never thought about that way. I get it. I would have a hard time knowing how to navigate that too,” that kind of thing. But I think the truth of the matter is we kind of all need to get out more. And I know that’s hard during the pandemic, but we kind of need to put ourselves out there beyond the people who are like us.

(31:58):
And that’s hard. I mean, that is a hard thing to ask. I know. But it really is when we encounter other people and we discover and we listen that we actively listen to what their experience is and realize where the common humanity is and also like realizing, wow, not everybody lives and thinks the way I do. And there’s a lot of legitimacy in what they’re thinking.

I think we kind of just have to live into it. Ideally, it happens in the church. I know it’s hard because a lot of our churches, we’re with people that are just like us. And so it might be the workplace. It might be at school. It does take some risk. But I do think that if we’re earnest and we long for that and we really do bring it to the Lord and say, “Lord, I don’t know how to do that.”

(32:58):
“I don’t really feel comfortable putting myself out there. Will you provide the opportunity?” If we are brave enough to pray that prayer, I am quite confident the Lord will bring the opportunity to us. We will know when that person shows up in our life.

Dr. Jeff Myers (33:18):
Well, Felicia, this has been such a fun conversation for me. I hope you’ve enjoyed it too. As I mentioned at the beginning, we had a whole bunch of technical difficulties trying to get connected here, but I felt like we ended up with a really different kind of conversation and hopefully one that’s more healing to people’s hearts in the time in which we live.

Felicia Wu Song (33:43):
Yeah. No, this has been great. Really appreciate this time with you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (33:47):
Special thank you to my guest today, Felicia Wu Song. You can find her new book, Restless Devices, through her website at feliciawusong.com and wherever books are sold. This was such a powerful conversation. I was personally moved by it, thinking of how much more I need to set aside my device and be contemplative in this time, because God is present with us all the time, everywhere. And social media companies are influencing our thinking. We need to be on guard. Proverbs 4:23 says, “Guard your heart, for from it flows the springs of life.” Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next week.

(34:31):
Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show. It’s a podcast from Summit Ministries, summit.org. Summit is a nonprofit ministry that exists to equip and support the rising generation to embrace God’s truth and champion a biblical worldview. For nearly 60 years, Summit Ministries has been training students and those who work with students to develop, deepen, and defend a biblical worldview through life-changing conferences, thoughtful church, homeschool and Christian school, curriculum books, free online resources and more.

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(35:35):
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