In The Terminator—James Cameron’s 1984 science fiction film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger—the time-traveling robot was sent back from 2029. The machine revolt could start any day now. Maybe.

Though time-traveling robots are fictional, it’s worth thinking about the ways technology has changed our lives. We often celebrate technology’s benefits, like the comfort of air conditioning, the extension of life through medicine, and the ease of personal communication via smartphones. Yet there are always trade-offs. Air conditioning encourages social isolation, medicines sometimes cause reactions, and smartphones can overstimulate us.

The contributors to Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age wrote to encourage people to wrestle with the effects of technology, especially smartphones. The title is a nod to Neil Postman’s classic Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, which was published 40 years ago, in 1985. The goal of the book is to help Christians think carefully about how technology is changing the way we think, often in subtle ways.

Given the book’s title, it’s no surprise that Amusing appears frequently within the notes. But many other books have also influenced the way the contributors think about technology. I asked the contributors to the book for their recommendations of the most important books for understanding how technology has shaped our culture.

Joe Carter

Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm (Penguin, 2014)

The Knowledge offers an imaginative yet practical exploration of how technology shapes human civilization. Dartnell considers what essential skills and knowledge would be needed to reconstruct society from scratch, prompting readers to reflect on our often unexamined dependence on technology. This engaging book serves as a timely reminder of humanity’s God-given ingenuity—and our self-imposed vulnerability—in an increasingly digital and disconnected age.

Collin Hansen

Nicholas Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart (W. W. Norton, 2025)

Fake stories get more attention on social media than real ones. Why? Because they’re more surprising. Then, by the time the truth gets out, no one seems to care. Now, consider what happens when machines create the content, choose who sees it, and deliver it. Will they determine that real stories get better results than fake ones? Yikes. Carr explains how social media has turned us into rivals by turning us all into media personalities. He also encourages us to stop playing that destructive game.

Samuel James

Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (Polity, 2020)

This isn’t, strictly speaking, a book about technology. Rather, it’s a book about how humans orient themselves toward the world. Rosa makes a compelling case that approaching life from a standpoint of optimization and control hinders our experience of transcendent meaning and wonder. What Rosa creates is a paradigm for understanding why digitization, curation, and constant connectivity don’t make us feel the happiness we expect. This is a thoughtful work of accessible and (though not explicitly) Roman Catholic philosophy.

Brett McCracken

Christine Rosen, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World (W. W. Norton, 2024)

In the disembodied digital world, we increasingly swipe, scroll, type, and tap our way through life. Our relationships are ever more through screens, apps, and avatars. Our sense of the world comes increasingly through mediated feeds of virtual realities rather than sensory experience and tangible interaction with the world right in front of us. What’s lost in a world like this? Rosen chronicles the various dimensions of this massive shift from embodied to virtual engagement with the world—and its many consequences for societal, relational, and even spiritual health.

Ivan Mesa

Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (Harper, 2018)

A researcher of reading and the brain begins to realize how digital life has affected her ability to read, empathize, and reflect. Through a series of letters, she examines what a “good reader” is (e.g., we’re meant not only to download information but to reflect and become wise), why “deep reading” matters (particularly for our young children), and how reading well guards a society from some its basest instincts. The middle chapters (on children, screens, and books) are especially filled with insight. Though written in 2018, before the advent of generative AI, this book still stands up on its own merits.

Jen Pollock Michel

Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again (Crown, 2023)

This popular book records Hari’s experience of a three-month “detox” from his laptop and smartphone. In the early weeks of his experiment, Hari experiences the painful withdrawal symptoms of an addict. Eventually, however, he begins to recover the capacity for sustained attention, and he muses on what’s gained in a life of presence.

Patrick Miller

Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focus in a Distracted World (Grand Central, 2016)

This isn’t a tech book. It’s wisdom literature. But here’s the thing: A doctor who knows only how to diagnose problems isn’t a doctor worth visiting. We must learn the proper treatment for our digital addictions, and Newport’s book on flow states and deep work is precisely that. While this isn’t a Christian book, Newport’s insights run with the grain of reality as God designed it, which is precisely why more Christians must embrace his approach to focused work, prolonged periods of nondistraction, and digital minimalism.

Keith Plummer

Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin, 2016)

Turkle, best known for her Alone Together, contends that we’re only fooling ourselves by thinking that technologically mediated communication is just as good as or better than face-to-face interaction. After discussing the contributing factors to our flight from conversation, she explains the casualties of such evasion in the spheres of family, friendship, romance, education, work, and public life. Though not written from a Christian perspective, this well-researched and accessible work affirms the goodness of embodiment and its vital part in communication.

Andrew Spencer

Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Vintage, 1993)

Technopoly is an accessible and vital companion to Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death because it updates his analysis in light of the early internet age. Just as Amusing proved surprisingly prophetic, so Technopoly anticipates the disintegration of social institutions due to the thoughtless adoption of technology. While Amusing focuses on media’s effects, Technopoly explains how technology can silently dominate our culture if we don’t resist it.