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Good morning I stared at the shattered screen of my mobile phone 10 days ago with total incredulity as I let out a ridiculously loud – “Noooooooo!” after I dropped it onto the cobbled streets of St Alban’s. How could the stupid thing do this thing to me? So it hasn’t been difficult to identify this week with Ofcom, the telecom regulator, heralding a landmark shift, driven by 4G technology, in our increasing reliance on smart phones. Because, a phone is no longer just a phone. For me personally it’s my diary, my photo album, my camera and my radio – my newspaper and my prayer book. And so I could go on. According to OfCom, 60% of all 16-24 year olds now use a smart phone as their main way of connecting to the internet. One third of all people check their phones within five minutes of waking up (I checked my new phone this morning 30 seconds after opening my eyes) and then people spend around two hours a day, on average, staring at their small screens. These are staggering statistics. And we are only just at the start as technology continues to develop. Surely, all of this can’t be good for a balanced human state, can it? Are not George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World pixilating right in front of our eyes? At the very least, OfCom’s research urges us to answer a basic question: do we have the balance right between what we might call digital disengagement and obsessive social interaction where even just a few minutes delay in answering a text from someone can wreak havoc? The American writer Richard Foreman believes that whilst the jury may be out on the sociological and spiritual consequences of digital technology “the entire world - the internet seems to offer - harmonizes strangely with the apple of the Tree of Knowledge offered to Eve”. We have already bitten the apple, so that’s that isn’t it? The former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said that Christian belief takes as fundamental the idea that human beings are created for communication. The books of the Bible are full of examples of advice about getting the balance of life right. Be still. Know when to speak and not to speak or, and I paraphrase, to text and not to text. Focus on the things that make you perfect as a human being rather than being addicted to a never ending stream if meaningless trivia and gossip. It’s as if the theology of communication needs to be rewritten as we wonder at what is overtaking us in the so called digital revolution. Whether what makes us human should really be so subsumed by a level of interconnectedness which can be, paradoxically as isolating as it is addictive?