The big cultural change of my adult life has been the explosion of social media. It is likely that most of my readers will have at least one, if not more, of the following accounts: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, TikTok. In fact, there’s a good chance, if you are reading this blog and don’t know me personally, that you found your way here via a link on twitter or facebook.
That leads us to my first point. There have been good things about social media. It’s helped to encourage a more interconnected world. It was through Facebook and YouTube that many of us were able to stay in touch and even facilitate a level of church and community life during the restrictive lockdowns of the global pandemic. Social media has enabled people to share content, whether it’s written, teaching or performative. Increasingly talent is discovered via Tiktok and YouTube. This has led to a greater level of democratisation. If you are relatively unknown and don’t have financial backing then that doesn’t restrict you from sharing your knowledge, gifts and opinion. This reduces the power of the old boys’ network.
There is bad that comes with that. Democratisation isn’t always a good thing. My dad says that my granddad would frequently finish an argument with a rhetorical flourish “it’s in a book so it must be true.” Today, “book” is replaced with “on the internet.” Whilst the internet allows us to get around old boys clubs and inner circles, it also allows us to get around other checks and balances that verify truth and monitor quality. Anyone can set up a blog and start writing, they don’t need any particular expertise or experience in a subject. Indeed, there seems to have been a mushrooming of people whose primary role is as “opinion formers”. This role used to be limited to one or two columns in the Sunday papers. The internet contributes to a culture of opinion trumping news so that truth becomes increasingly relative.
What about the ugly? Well there are aspects of social media that are set up to bring out the worst in us. Think about how every platform offers the opportunity for you to like or dislike, to reshare and to vote. Think about how we are constantly encouraged to check our stats, how many people loved your post? How many comments did you attract? How many have followed or unfollowed you? It encourages us to look for identity and self-worth based on whether or not people engage with us. And let’s face it, it encourages an instantaneous and shallow response as we click the relevant emoji without thinking about it and when what the person really needs is a phone call or a visit. Social media can both increase the amount of connectivity between us whilst at the same time decreasing the quality.
The ugliness is also seen in the way that people interact. It’s a frequent complaint that twitter encourages trolling as people put out their hot takes, respond angrily, fail to develop a reasoned argument etc. The internet can often become a hostile and frightening environment with some as cyber-trolls begin to threaten violence. It’s hard to police and so it also becomes a place where slander and defamation take place. Incidentally, neither Twitter or Facebook offer an easy way to report someone for defamation. Character assassination is all too easy.
Because of the bad and the ugly, some people prefer to stay well away from certain social media platforms. That might not be a bad decision but I think you have to know yourself and your own limits and temptations. I don’t fall into the camp which believes that social media is automatically bad and ugly. In fact, I have persistently argued that social media doesn’t create new behaviours. It simply amplifies behaviours that were already there. If you are intense, angry, hectoring, slandering, mean, bad tempered on Twitter, then you should probably stay away from social media, not because social media makes you like that but because that probably reflects what you are like in real life, Twitter simply gives you a bigger platform for unpleasantness! The solution then of course is not to merely close down your accounts, though that might help as an initial response. Rather the solution is to deal with the true, underlying heart issue. If social media draws your attention to a problem within your own heart, then even if it seems ugly at first, perhaps it is still doing a good service.
I would encourage churches to be talking about social media. Think about how you might address these things in sermon application, or what a discussion night might look like. Think about the pastoral implications for those who have become addicted or have been harmed by unhealthy interactions, how will you support them? Does your church make healthy use of social media that encourages church members to do the same?
Faithroots 