The Ramparts of the Digital Continent
I have attended enough conferences, listened to enough homilies and retreats, and watched enough well-edited YouTube videos warning me of the dangers of social media to last me a lifetime. While I appreciate the warnings of how toxic having an online presence can be towards our mental, spiritual, and even physical health, I’m always left a bit frustrated as the answer to dealing with this unhealthy culture typically involves stepping away mostly or entirely from our phones and spending more time in the “real world.” It is definitely true that we can spend way too much time on our screens and this can be detrimental to maintaining a well-balanced schedule of prayer, work, and leisure. The temptations that enter into our life when we open a browser or social media app are plenty and it may lead us to ask, “is any of this worth it?”
Honestly, there are days when I want to completely disconnect from everything as the endless scrolling and vapid conversations prove to be anything but edifying. Maybe many of us have felt this way before, but once we turn off the phone we realize that we don’t really have anywhere else to go.
Whether we like it or not, online communities (social media, online gaming, streaming platforms) provide for many exactly that… community. For maybe the first time in someone’s life, they may feel like they belong as they find a group of men and/or women who share a similar passion for a particular cultural niche.
Even in a pre-Covid world, many younger generations continue to face the roadblock of finding new friends in the “real world.” Where previous generations would find natural gathering places in churches or social clubs, younger people are feeling increasingly isolated and lonely as cultural trends move away from these spaces. The digital communities provide some sense of connection that, if suddenly taken away, would leave a significant void that many would find very difficult to immediately fill.
Maybe it is foolish, but I have hope that our interactions online can be different. In fact, if we want to really be intentional about loving God, self, and neighbor, it seems imperative that we do work for a change. Instead of abandoning the digital continent, perhaps we could see ourselves as missionaries that are relentless in making God’s merciful love known through all of our online encounters.
In order to do this, it is essential that we take stock of what dangers may be lurking in the shadows, waiting to entice us to obscure the personhood of those we meet and instead see them as objects of pleasure, a punching bags to express our anger, or a two-dimensional figures that we categorize and dismiss rather than truly listen and dialogue. The temptations are vast and it is important that we recognize how we are encouraged to forgo our own humanity or the humanity of others and instead make every effort to confront these lies as we make known God’s merciful love.
At this point I would like to point out a danger and a possible remedy to counteract its effects as we try to orient ourselves to the realities of the digital continent. If we can avoid the dangers and cultivate healthy habits in our own interactions with others online, hopefully we can not lose sight of the cultural change needed in this environment.
Danger
An idea, oft attributed to Andy Warhol, is that everyone will, at some point in their lives, have 15 minutes of fame. With the advent of social media and the ability for almost anyone to post about anything anytime they want, it would seem that achieving this end would be easier. Humans are fickle, though, and just as beautiful sunrises, sunsets, magnificent views of mountains, or the intimate delicacy of a flower blooming can be taken for granted after seeing so many, so too do we see the many posts on social media blending into the background of our everyday existence. Instead of treasuring the words and actions - and the person who is creating the content - that we see on our phones, the many faces, voices, and images all kind of blur together as we continuously scroll deeper and deeper into the void of vapid entertainment. Some try to defy the algorithms and churn out post after post, video after video, all in the hope that maybe they will go viral and the unsteady spotlight of human attention may fall on them for a brief moment before the shadow of irrelevance once again overtakes them.
In almost every kind of online platform (social media, online gaming, streaming, etc) it seems that there is a dangerous tendency to crave relevance through having the most viewers, the most likes, the most shares and engagement with our content. This tendency has created a new kind of celebrity that doesn’t require you to live in a certain part of the world or have access to PR firms or media outlets. This new kind of celebrity could be anyone; in fact, it is everyone. In other words, celebrity has been normalized to the point that we all have a “public persona” through our various social media platforms that can have a significant impact on future employment or acceptance to schools, the deterioration of friendships and family relationships, and even our mental, spiritual, and physical well-being.
Because of the normalization of celebrity, there exists a very strong temptation to idolize the self. This danger may be veiled under the appearance of worshipping the old paradigm’s celebrities (musicians, movie/television stars, internet personalities, politicians, etc), but hidden within this false god is a desire to compare, tear down others, or dig deeper into self-hatred. There are far too many habits that we can easily take on that reinforce this danger: from constantly posting images of ourselves to always feeding that need to make our voice heard by endlessly commenting and entering into arguments that do nothing but reinforce a limited view of those we encounter.
Idolizing the self pushes us to the extreme of self-delusion as we close our ears and eyes to the point that we can only hear and see others if they are indulging our fragile egos by affirming our self-destructive behaviors and praising them as “self-care” or something that we deserve. Ultimately, when we worship ourselves, it reduces our capacity to love. Living in this shallow way shrinks our hearts to the point that we move from one banal and meaningless relationship to another, always wondering why our lives feel so empty. When true and authentic love appears in our lives we can actually run from it as we’ve conditioned ourselves to subsist on superficiality and anything deeper would compromise the frail structures that uphold our narrowed sense of reality.
Remedy
How can we avoid this danger to pursue celebrity and idolize the self?
First, it seems necessary to root ourselves in reality. This means that we need to cut through all of the layers of self-importance, past the narrow view that can convince us that the only stories that matter are those with the juiciest gossip, that stir the most anger, or that can lead us to idolizing ourselves or the lifestyles of those we will most likely never meet. To do this we need to step back from the small stories that dominate the news cycles and our social media feeds and place ourselves within the larger story of God’s love. When we can make the biblical narrative our own and see how we are actually part of this bigger and more meaningful story, we will see how quickly the superficial drama that tries to creep into our lives melts away and is replaced with something much more substantial.
Knowing the bigger story of creation, the weakness of humanity, and the God that pursues each of us leads us to a decision point where we have to say that we either want to live in this reality or reject it and continue disintegrating as life becomes like shadows on a cave wall, distorted and deeply dissatisfying.
It can take practice to stay rooted in reality as there are a seemingly endless number of distractions that want to convince us that a certain pleasure is all that exists, leaving us to constantly chase after something so hollow, yet alluring. In order to build a healthy habit of living in reality we have to have confidence in obscurity or hiddenness. This means that we don’t have to feed the beast of self-idolization and celebrity by constantly posting or commenting, and instead can find satisfaction in letting those temptations simply pass by.
If we can’t find a trace of God’s merciful love in the motivation for posting, the words we use, or how we are seeing those we interact with, it is necessary to take a step back and re-orient ourselves to the bigger story. This takes practice. It takes the time to consistently build a habit rooted in love of God, self, and neighbor rather than a distorted view of the god of self and all others being subservient to that warped worldview. I think that we owe it to those that we interact with online and ourselves to at least make an effort to be different, to offer something other than anger, unhealthy comparisons, and condescension.
We don’t have to abandon the ship. In fact, the sheer number of inhabitants on the digital continent seems to demand almost the opposite. A more sustained and intentional effort to make known His love in spaces either unaware or hostile to it has been planted within the hearts of those already familiar with it. Instead of simply accepting the toxic environment and thinking it will never change, how can we, like the missionaries of centuries past, see those we encounter online not as adversaries or people to conquer, but as those in desperate need of love?