The Digital Desires Inbox, Volume 1: Taken by the Tetris Blocks, Conquered by Clippy, Invaded by the iWatch

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So, “we must” — we must, no suggestion or hint, but a demand — pay much closer attention to Christ. Affectional drift — heart drift — away from Christ happens through attentional negligence, when we no longer focus on Christ. This, I argue, is one of the core challenges we face as Christians inside the attention economy, and one of the greatest challenges we face as Christian leaders. This is the root problem Christians face in the age of the spectacle: Compared to the thrill of our pixilated screens, we lose confidence that Christ really can satisfy me. Four Principles for Discipleship in a Digital Age The porn industry wants your lust. YouTubers will give you new spectacles in exchange for your views and your likes. Netflix flat-out wants our most precious commodity: our time — deliberately and intentionally trying to intrude on our sleep patterns to extract even more time from us. Politicians want our votes. The gaming industry wants our money. And so, from each of them comes a vast array of eye-grabbing spectacles, each demanding something from us. Sasha Grey: We are all sexual beings. Sex is just as an important part of our lives as the need to eat, breathe, drink water, and socialize. There will always be a group of people who are asexual and people who don’t relate to it, but as a whole, it is vital to our survival.

Biz: Sasha, you were raised Catholic, and Isabella, you’re from Honduras, where there’s a strong Catholic influence. You also incorporate Christian iconography into some of your imagery. Did these early influences shape you? Were they a point of rebellion?

There are many temptations church leaders face to make the Sunday gatherings of the church as visibly spectacular as possible. The church, having been tempted to appeal to the spectacle industry, starts taking on the vibe of a theater: lasers and neon lights and sermon trailer videos and fog machines. We can over-index on visual production. We want to be excellent in what we do (yes, absolutely) and we want to be creative too (certainly) all while being careful not to leave the impression that we’re simply trying to impress eyes. No! The work of ministry is to persuade hearts — through the ear — to treasure unseen realities.

Like Grey, Lovestory understands the modality of desire—the many different shapes it takes, how gritty and dark it can get, and how funny it can all seem after the moment’s passed. “Love can be nasty and violent, it’s not always a sugary fairytale,” says Lovestory of the passionate stories behind her songs. “Sex is liberating and the most primal creative expression, but this same feeling can be found in other sides of life, not everything sexy is about sex.” Recently, Lovestory was shot by Richard Kern, the legendary downtown New York photographer known for his transgressive portraits of unvarnished female sexuality and an early collaborator of Grey’s. We dare not let the greatness of Jesus Christ get lost on our affections. This is one of the greatest threats to Christians in the digital age. It’s as easy as giving our affections over to this age of the visible spectacle — to this attention economy — and our delight in Christ will deteriorate. We will drift. And that drift, away from Christ, for digital thrills, is the worst trade in the universe — to turn away from God’s great Spectacle in favor of the next little buzz of media offered by the world.

about Digital Desires

blondes women closeup digital desire magazine izolda a faces belorussian 2560x1600 Nature close-up HD Art A spectacle is a moment of time, of varying length, in which a collective gaze is fixed on some specific image, or video, or event. A spectacle is something that captures human attention, an instant when our eyes and brains focus and fixate on something projected at us. In an outrage society like ours, spectacles are often controversies — the latest scandal in sports, entertainment, or politics. Nishtha Jaiswal and Spoorthi Bammidi are first year MA students of Media and Cultural Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.