I read a lot of blogs and over the weeks and months I save many articles on themes I’m interested in. They show how people from all walks of life, not just Christians, are grappling with a particular issue. Some of those issues clearly interweave and overlap so it’s worthwhile grouping them together. I’m sharing them here as a resource, both for myself, but for others to help navigate and understand.

How should parents deal with smartphones and social media in a society where both have come to ‘feel’ essential even for kids? How should churches and workers understand AI? Is AI becoming ‘too big to fail’? What technology should schools embrace and what should they forbid? What kind of people is this shaping us to be? Are we as powerless as we sometimes feel? Is it really better?

There are contributions from theologians, pastors, teachers, economists, social scientists, teenagers, news organisations and ordinary people like you and me

Schools & Phones

• Jonathan Haidt on a recent study about phone free schools
• Back to books – Sweden’s schools cutting back on digital learning

Kids, smartphones & social media

• Where Do the Children Play? It might be that, “digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us.”
• Film Students Can No Longer Sit Through Films
• Tired of Fighting Your Teen’s Phone? – One parent’s suggestion.
• Parenting in an Age of Smartphones – Jez Field with the encouragement
• On social media and parents – don’t ask the government to do what you should, as a parent, do.
• An Important New Study on Phones and Kids. Consider this sentence: “Little is lost by preventing a 14-year-old from accessing TikTok or Snapchat, or telling a 10-year-old they cannot have unrestricted access to the internet through their own smartphone, but so much will almost certainly be gained.”
• Books to Help Parents With Tech
• Don’t Give Kids Smartphones! Louise Perry interviews Jean Twenge
• Here are 13 Other Explanations for the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis. None of Them Work. Here’s Twenge again on why only smartphones & social media explain the mental health crisis in teenagers
• It Was the Damn Phones: A Gen Z poet conveys the effects of the phone-based childhood
• Looks bad.
• But there’s another side. Not everyone agrees – the mainstream view
• And Think through the situation one step further
• And Don’t ban teenagers from social media

Phones & You

• The State of the Internet: 2026. I’ll put this one here but this long and thoughtful reflection from Mere Orthodoxy is about more than just the internet. Take your time or just hope to the questions at the bottom because they’re very helpful.
• 7 Ways Your Phone is Harming You
• Can turning off your phone bring you closer to God?
• Survivor, Life Without the Phone, and the Shock of Coming Back
• How to end your extremely online era: “Most of a good life is simply refusing to do what is bad.”
• And Brad East is Out of touch
• Kingsnorth’s Machine – read this because Alan Jacobs ends up not really critiquing Kingsnorth’s critique but correctly seeing why we still get more critiques! “I believe we keep on re-diagnosing, and describing the same diagnosis in slightly different terms, because we don’t know what to do. Some people, of course, know what to do: they opt out. And that’s why we don’t hear from them: we remain in the places that they’ve opted out of.”
• Is it Really So Much Better Now? “This growing “corrosion of the soul” isn’t simply a result of increasing technology, but of how we have chosen to use technology, which isn’t only to replace dangerous and repetitive work, but to also try and replace human interaction.”

On all things AI

• I’m putting this one up top because Brad East asks The [right] question about AI: “What kind of person is it likely to make me to be? What virtues or vices will it develop or diminish?”
• Experimental cafe run by AI opens in Stockholm
• On AI and the railroads
• Is Claude Mythos “Terrifying” or Just Hype?
• Why Can’t AI Empty My Inbox?
• And don’t use AI emails for promoting your project
• Contra: The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet
• OpenAI puts erotic chatbot plans on hold ‘indefinitely’. Thank God.
• Meet the Sad Wives of AI
• Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months – not quite but point taken: “Consider those loonies who believe that the Apollo moon landing never happened. Now imagine a world in which everybody is like that about everything—because nothing can be proven.”
• Easy is Overrated: “making things faster or easier is not the same as making things better”.