In 1957, journalist Edward R. Murrow referred to television as the “opiate of the people”.
It’s safe to say that in the last 5 years, social media has decisively replaced television on the opiate throne. Given the sheer amount of attention we give to it, the number of times we check our devices throughout the day, and the ways in which we now interpret, process, and translate our experiences in terms of how we want to relay them via Facebook, Instagram, and/or Twitter, social media has literally altered our consciousness.
Certainly, there are positives with being able to keep up with folks near and far, and what’s going on their lives. We can celebrate milestones, encourage, offer condolences. But there are a couple of key elements of these platforms which, increasingly, I’m convicted are damaging our souls.
The first is that there’s a sort of insidious narcissism that takes root when using these platforms. In fact, such narcissism is the fuel that these platforms run on, the energy that keeps them afloat. Without it, they couldn’t exist. They leverage our innate desire to be known, and to be affirmed.
Such desires in and of themselves are not bad, of course. We were designed for such things: designed to be in community, created to know and to be known by others and, most importantly, to know and be known by our Creator. But I’m increasingly of the conviction that social media warps the concept of community – it least community in the way were were designed to experience it.
As I’ve written before, these platforms not only allow us to broadcast even the most minute details of our day, but also to craft a custom-tailored image of ourselves as we do. Platforms like Facebook take the old tradition of an annual Christmas letter and turn it into a daily, 24×7 running commentary, accentuating the positive and (often) sweeping the negative under the rug. Not only does this impulse to post throughout our day hinder us from simply experiencing, appreciating, and enjoying the moment we’re in, it also takes the types of daily minutia that used to be shared among a local collection of neighbors and church family who we were “doing life” with, and broadcasts it to an audience of hundreds, most of whom aren’t in any position to see our daily warts and foibles.
Yet, uncomfortable though it can often be, it’s precisely those local people – people who have their own idiosyncrasies, warts, and foibles, people who sometimes get on our nerves (as we undoubtedly get on theirs), people who may have different political leanings than we do – who are best in a position to keep us honest, keep us humble, and help us to learn how to live out the Biblical command to “love one another”. Such accountability is almost entirely absent in virtual communities, and I believe that’s a significant factor in our ever-increasing tribalism.
The second damaging element that I’ve both witnessed and experienced is a nearly ever-present FOMO – fear of missing out. It’s what prompts us to habitually reach for our devices – in Pavlovian style – to check our texts and feeds and emails, dozens of times each day. In doing so, it causes us to fail to pay attention to and appreciate our surroundings, or to pay attention and appreciate the people we’re with.
And in an even more subtle way, it gives us a gnawing sense that whatever situation we find ourselves in, it’s not good enough. We’re missing something. We’re unsatisfied. And we’ve come to believe that this gnawing feeling can be ameliorated if we can just check our texts and our feeds. But then we often see that the people in our feeds appear to be living much more interesting lives than we are, and it makes our own dissatisfaction run even deeper.
All of this is what has – in part – put me on a track to delete my Facebook account before the end of the year. Some of the other factors driving me to that decision I’ll leave for another post.