Haven B's Reviews > 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

This book was great! There was rarely a dull moment while reading this, which is rare for me when reading non-fiction. I think I genuinely did come away from this with a clearer knowledge of how smartphones/technology keeps a hold on us all and how it controls us.

Reinke uses interesting and intriguing real-life examples or quotes at the beginning of (and throughout) most of his chapters, which immediately hooks you and grabs at the very thing he explains in this book, our "Neomania," what Reinke defines as "an addiction to anything new within the last five minutes." But these interesting tidbits and stories only add to the message of the chapter and overall book; and Reinke doesn't tell stories the whole time - these examples and stories he has found and shares with us quickly leads into his writing on what it means about our phones. Addiction to new curiosities is just one of the subjects he talks about, splitting them up into 12 general categories, held each within the 12 chapters of this book, the “ways in which our smartphones are changing us and undermining our spiritual health."

(as a side note, in addition to our spiritual health which is the focal point of this book, Reinke touches on our phone-afflicted mental health, and, in the Epilogue, briefly looks into the actual physical effects our phone has on us).

To roughly sketch out to you the chapters of this book: Our phones "amplify our addiction to distractions" (chapter 1), our phones "push us to evade the limits of embodiment" (chapt. 2), our phones "feed our craving for immediate approval" (3), they "undermine key literary skills" (4), and "offer us a buffet of produced media" (5), and "overtake and distort our identity" (6), and tempt us "toward unhealthy isolation and loneliness" (7), and "to indulge in visual vices" (8), making it hard "to identify ultimate meaning" (9), while also promising to "hedge against our fear of missing out [(FOMO)]" (10). Finally, our phones "cause us to treat one another harshly" (11) and "splinter our perception of our place in time" (12).
So there is the "Table of Contents," if you will, of this book.

Read it (it's a book any 21st century Christian should and can read), learn from it (how could you not when is so informed and theologically insightful?), be humbled (you will be), and be inspired to end your smartphones woes (whether that be addiction to it, hatred for it, want for approval, want for distraction, etc) and use this tool (for that is what it is) rightfully.

TL;DR: In this book, hopefully, you'll learn how to take back control of your phone and stop letting your phone control you.

5 stars ["it was amazing"]