Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to the Truth Exchange podcast. This is a weekly program with Doctor Jeffrey J. Ventrella where he answers questions from subscribers around the globe, answering questions about worldview, cultural apologetics, and other miscellaneous items. I'm your host, Joshua Guillotine, and this is another edition of the director's Bag.
Alright, we have a question from Jeff in the UK. Dear TXC, thank you for continuing to broadly engage on multiple topics with the christian worldview. I'm a youngish father with two little ones at home. One of the areas I became convicted of as I read the last article was how much time I spent on my phone after work as a way to unwind rather than with my kids or my wife, who also may or may not be looking at her device without being or falling into retrievalism. That's a hat tip to a recent dicta that you wrote at the beginning of this year. Do you have any pointers for married couples that you would give to make wise use of technology and at the same time not to lose our face in it?
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's a very perceptive question, and it's so neat to see people from across the pond that we are engaging with them in cultural apologetics, with the truth exchange perspective. Well, I think a couple of we need to set the table a little bit. Number one is christians ought not to be Luddites or technological phobic. In fact, you know, technology is a good thing. It's part of the cultural mandate. We develop that with respect to musicality, with respect to artistry, with respect to improving our working conditions, our labors, being innovative and inventive. These are all positive things. So let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to technology. But we do need to be realistic and understand that not only does technology change our lives, but it changes us. And so we need to be cognizant of the impact on it. So, just to give you an example, isn't it interesting that we oftentimes, and I think we're all susceptible to it, we pull out our iPhones when we're waiting, largely because the virtue of patience is not very evident. And so we use our tool, this iPhone, to, you know, distract us or to do what we think is a crucial email or something like that. Think about this. Would you pull out any other tool that you have? It's like, oh, I'm standing in line at the grocery store. I know I'll pull out my hammer and I want to diddle with my hammer a little bit. Or, hey, I know I've got my tape measure. I'm just going to play with my tape measure now that I'm standing in line. So why do we treat the iPhone as a tool, as a placator of our impatience rather than some other tool? So it's just a contrast there. But the other thing I would say is, giving advice to this family with two young children is when you are face to face, have the discipline to put down the devices that can distract from the face to face time. So when you're in the car and the kids are in the backseat, there's not a screen, there's not an iPad. You and your wife are talking that sort of thing when you're at the dinner table. Let's just have that embargoed area. I was really pleased with the christian owned business Chick fil A for a while, that they had a thing called the barn, and it was on the tables in their restaurants. And if the family would come in or a group of people and they would put their phones voluntarily in the barn, chick fil a rewarded them with free dessert because they wanted to encourage face to face time. So I think that's really important there as we look at how we're going to deal with mediated matters. So I think there's a lot that can be done in a disciplinary way that will help us there when we are face to face, let's in fact be face to face and not obscure that or distract it. Now, are there exceptions? Of course. When a couple of our sons were on deployment in combat zones, we kept our phones near the dinner table in case we didn't want to miss something crucial or if someone was in labor delivering, we kept our phones close by. That's just a matter of discipline and accommodation, using the tool for what it was intended to be. But when it becomes the go to kind of babysitter of our minds, we're in a dangerous situation. So I think when we're with people, we can put them away. When we're alone, it becomes a little more difficult to engage in that way.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: There is a post that you did on social media, and I'd like to go back to it, and here I'm going to pull it up so I could quote you correctly. And it's regarding using technology as a medium for reading. And you made the point that people who do all their reading on their phone cannot become or remain truly educated.
If you wish to be genuinely educated, you're going to have to take the time and effort to read quite a few hard copy books there's just no way around it. And I know there are some people who pushed back on that, but that was quite provocative as that there's making use of technology as a pedagogy and you as an educator, doctor Ventrella, you teach through the means of technology through Zoom. I think it is as well as you have a lot of experience in person. And I would like to just see what's your take as using technology as a various means of pedagogy.
Which one do you prefer first and then second? What is the limits of using technology versus the face to face?
[00:06:32] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's a very important question and let me start out by analyzing it this way.
I have a son who was a former Marine Corps officer and he kept telling me that GPS makes a stupid dad. You shouldn't rely upon GPS. And I'm kind of like, hey, I am directionally challenged. I'm going to use everything I can. But here's the point. The GPS makes you your vehicle, where your phone is actually the center of experience. It provides no perspective from where you've been nor to where you're going. Or if it does, it's a very limited event horizon, whereas an atlas or a paper map gives you directional perspective and place. And so it allows you to understand and to grasp kind of the actual lay of the land. And I think that's the same with respect to reading in hard copy versus reading on an iPad. Now I have an iPad and I use it for all my pleasure reading. What I mean by that is thrillers, mysteries, you know, that kind of stuff that I call mind candy. I'm not really interested. I'm not taking notes, I'm not highlighting, I'm not indexing it, I'm not moving ahead, cross referencing it, looking at the index, looking at the thing of authors cross pollinating it. So I think it's a very different educational experience. And in fact, the outcomes now there are many scientists that have studied this show that when you use hard copy books and take notes by hand as a vers to as instead of digitally retention rates higher, understanding is higher, being able to cross pollinate concepts as much higher. So when I teach alive, it's a no technology zone.
When I'm going to be teaching a new class this next semester and I had the option of having the children, the students, save some money with the textbook if they got it electronically or hardback, they're going to get the hardback because there is this continuity to be able to see the lay of the land map of the land, because the education doesn't simply consist of words, it consists of how they are patterned and laid out. And you can't get a good feel for that scrolling. You get lost in the weeds of the words. And so from an educated standpoint, I think that that's why I think that post, the focus of that post, was not posed to digitized reading, but understanding it. You're not going to be truly educated by being able to do that. And there's something also tactile about having to go through. And again, there's now studies that verify this, that your own highlighting, your own underscoring your own taking notes actually helps you learn the material even better. And so that's part of that education. You are actively reading as opposed to just scrolling like you do with reels. And oh, look at this, and oh, look at that. And there's a very interesting article in the Atlantic Monthly, I believe was last month, because the new one just came, it just said, why elites? Why students at elite universities can't read a book.
They have lost the ability to concentrate and to focus in those sorts of things. And I think, frankly, being a leader, you know, the Marine Corps has, the commandant has his list of books. Leaders are readers. Now here's this pretty door kicking institution that understands that if you're going to lead men in combat, you've got to be a leader. And the only way you get there is through by reading copious amounts of books deeply. So. So I think there's a pedagogical as well as just in the actual outcomes are better by reading hard copy books.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: You know, that's interesting point, Jeff, is when, when I was in seminary, I had some professors who said no computers in the lab, handwritten only. And for those props, those classes where I had it, handwrite, I noticed my note taking was not word for word, but it was what I was understanding, what I was learning in compressing and bite sized note form. Whereas from my other classes, when I was on a computer was, it was more word for word of exactly what the professor was. But I noticed from those classes, for me personally, I wound up coming away with digesting what I was learning from the handwritten class, those classes that were handwritten notes, versus when I was just typing word for word.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: That is very interesting because there's surveys that are studies that actually reflected that precisely, that when you listen and has to process that and process the information, you are doing something that if you're, if you have the capability to type, you know, 80 words a minute or whatever, you tend to be a transcriber, not a digester. And I like your word there. And that's been proven because your handwriting is not as fast, even cursive handwriting. And I think that those notes make a huge difference if you do it that way. Now, if you want to then digest it further and put it in a readable form, you know, type up a document subsequently, that's great. You're going over the material again. But yeah, there's actually empirical studies that verify exactly what you've said, and your retention rate will be higher, and you're understanding the material will be more comprehensive.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: Fantastic.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: Exactly right.
[00:12:57] Speaker A: This concludes the recording of the director's bag. For more resources from Truth exchange, please visit us online at www.truthexchange.com. you can follow us on x as well as Facebook for more updates and content related to Truth exchange. Be sure to join us next week for more questions from the director's bag. I'm your host, Joshua Guillotine, and this is the Truth Exchange podcast.
