Penitent Disciple

With the exception of grocery ads, I usually don’t get store flyers in the mail – except during the week of Black Friday. Leafing through this year’s ads, I’m struck by the sheer number – and visual prominence – of “smart” TVs, smart phones, tablets, Orwellian listening stations from Google and Amazon, and other electronic media devices.

And I’ll be honest – the 2012 version of me would be salivating over this stuff. Back then, if I wasn’t an early adopter of a device, I was a “fast follower”, digging through to find the best deals on last year’s latest tech. So part of me understands the allure.

I can’t really pinpoint a particular time when my feelings about such things changed – it’s been a gradual diminishing of enthrallment, though that diminishing has accelerated during the past couple of years. I’ve already posted about my disenchantment with smart phones, and I’ve since gotten rid of them, as well as a few tablets I had. (I should admit that I did retain one smart phone, with a non-contract, pay-as-you-go 4G service plan, for email access in an emergency if my home internet service goes out for an extended period of time. But it’s in storage in the basement).

And I honestly don’t watch much TV these days. 2K? 4K? 8K? Meh. My 9-year-old Vizio 42-inch TV in the living room is chugging along just fine. It mostly serves as a media center monitor for a mini-PC running Linux Mint, but I do also have an older Roku device, and Hulu service which I mostly use to watch live sports on occasion (but probably not often enough to justify the monthly expense). Space-wise, the media console that the TV sits on can’t really accommodate a TV that’s much bigger. I’m also probably outside the norm in that I don’t have a TV in the bedroom.

But back to the Black Friday ads…Looking through them, I’m reminded of Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves To Death’. The divisions in our culture are a source of stress for most of us, which causes us to seek diversions in things like television and mobile devices/social media, which further isolates us and balkanizes us into tribes, which deepens the divisions, which…

Lord have mercy. If you’re a person of faith, pray for the discipline, and the courage, to unplug in a meaningful way.

Several years ago I completed a masters degree in Communication Studies, with the focus on communication & culture, and how technology was affecting the ways we communicate. The effects of technology on the culture are never neutral, and one can usually find both positive and negative consequences from pretty much any technology.

Computer-mediated communications technologies have allowed inexpensive, nearly effortless and instant communication with almost anyone else in the world.  As I mentioned in Part 1, easily keeping up with the people we care about can be a great blessing. Learning and interacting with others about any number of topics can be of great use. Such things can definitely be tallied on the plus side.

But there are down sides as well:

• The lack of nonverbal cues (facial expressions, tone of voice, body posture, etc.) make it much more easy to misinterpret statements and comments. Sure, things like emoticons help a bit, but there’s a still a good chance of misunderstanding someone’s meaning.
• The communicative norms of face-to-face interaction – politeness, civility, and the like – are easily discarded when the person we’re communicating with is a non-present, non-corporeal entity.
• The ability to find people with common interests and outlooks can – and often does – easily lead to aligning only with groups of self-selected confirmation bias.

Add in politics, and you quickly have a profoundly toxic combination. Identity politics easily drowns out any values or goals that we might hold in common. Things quickly devolve into “us vs. them”. And the outrage can feed on itself and become addictive.

It all conspires to make social media a really lousy place to discuss such things.

More tragically, it’s increasingly creating such anger and resentment in relationships that it’s resulting in such things as family members not speaking to one another, and people skipping class reunions because of political differences online. As I posited a year or two ago on Facebook, social media becomes a crucible in which political issues erupt in a fiery blaze that easily burns away our humanity.

Now, I firmly believe (as I’m sure I’ve stated on multiple occasions on Facebook) that the primary driver behind this phenomenon is that we’ve placed far too much trust, hope, and power in government. We’ve outsourced many of the things that we should be doing in our own communities, but have been too lazy and selfish to do. The current political stakes are so high because we’ve allowed them to become so. Government has effectively become God for a great many people – provider, caretaker, the arbiter of morality. And this, I believe, is true for a great number of people who would otherwise identify themselves as Christians, even though they may not recognize or admit it that it’s true.

The vitriol and anger seems to be spiraling upward at an exponential rate. I’m not sure there’s an easy answer, but I think it begins with those of us – people of goodwill who recoil at such expressions of anger – to be a voice of calm, and reason, and thoughtful, respectful dialogue.

One movement I read about not long ago, which I think is on the right track, is called “Make America Dinner Again”. It’s about inviting people – friends and neighbors, who may not agree on politics – over for dinner and getting to know them, and letting them get to know each other. The idea is not just gathering for a meal – it also includes talking about problems, and sharing ideas to address those problems locally. No one’s required to surrender their beliefs, but in general, people tend to agree on more things than they disagree on. If we have different ideas about how to solve “X”, but we can agree that “X” is a problem – well, that’s a start. And we can begin to see folks as humans, rather than a faceless, dehumanized “other”.

As someone who’s working to become a more faithful Christian, and to take the gospel and the words of scripture seriously, I’m praying for a revival of prayer and humility to sweep the nation, and the world, and for the spirit of God to manifest itself in powerful ways. But one doesn’t have to be a Christian to participate in a deescalation and an outpouring of love.

So let’s do everything we can to not escalate the rancor. Let’s look for ways to foster calm, respectful dialogue. And let’s try to create spaces that can be a shelter in the storm.