On the other hand, social media is doubtless affecting our humanity. I see this at my local YMCA. If I’m playing pickup basketball with some teenagers, they often leave headphones on during the game. Since their ability regularly eclipses mine, I venture to say “nice shot” and form a basic human connection with them, but they cannot hear me. I am not a meaningful part of their world; I am, like a “rando” in someone’s Instagram photo, merely part of the social backdrop.
Using social media requires much discernment and carefulness, to be sure. It does concern me in one big area: familial privacy. In the same way that Cal Newport has persuasively argued for concentration as a real human good, I believe that privacy is a genuine common-grace gift. Like the power to concentrate, privacy is fragile and must be carefully protected. The family is its own little world. It is not outside the care and even discipline of the local church, of course; it must not be. But God has so ordered marriage and childraising as to be wonderfully, indulgently, closed in many senses.
Our modern obsession with “community” (both personal and technological) seems to me to detract from the real need for fathers and mothers to love and invest in their children. If we are spending more time chatting, texting or tweeting with friends, even for good purposes, and taking less time to train and have fun with and disciple and discipline our progeny, we need to re-right that paradigm.
To speak more strongly, I believe we should resist Mark Zuckerberg’s smiling but ominous urges to broadcast our private life. (Steve Jobs is a better guide here—he was very careful with how much media and technology his kids engaged. He’s worth emulating there.) It is no bad thing to have a public life, but we should take pains to guard in appropriate ways the precious isolation of our marriages, our investment in our children, our personal pursuit of God and our enjoyment of the quiet pleasures of everyday life. We need wisdom here, but if I must, let me be—in the immortal words of You’ve Got Mail—a lone reed in the cultural wild in suggesting this approach.
Lastly, let us never close our spiritual eyes to the effects of social media on our souls. We must take care here, for our modern milieu strains to indoctrinate us to disavow belief in the soul. But the soul, contrary to Dawkins’s protestations and Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s chest-puffing intimidations, is very much alive, and it is a delicate thing. It must be cultivated, stewarded, guarded. These are ineffable realities, happily beyond the reach of the quantifiable, but I know at an existential level that social media has an effect on me. When I take in great doses of it, this effect is baleful, not life-giving.
To counter its pull, we should read more Bible, and savor the Scripture’s beauty and power and mystical wonder, and care for our soul. We should definitely discipline ourselves, and set rules and principles of usage (like taking certain weekends totally off, putting the phone away for hours at night, and so on). I also think it’s helpful to not feel the need to react to the latest news-cycle. Surely some engagement is warranted, but we cannot miss that our culture is desperate for us to get sucked into the latest tempest in a tea-pot.
Let’s be honest: Outrage culture works. Even many Christians who denounce it with an eyeroll emoji nonetheless seem glued to it, and very nearly dependent on it for affirmation from their audience. This isn’t healthy in my view. Some things really are awful and emblematic of broader problems and deserve commenting on; many are not. Let us not miss that the sky now falls every couple days or so. We do well to remember that public figures are in many cases lost, and to thus let secularism play out its hand-wringing, pearl-clutching tableau without us.
The days are evil, the culture is astir, but God is on the move, and we have the Spirit. We have what we need to engage social media, and all modern technology, with care and discretion. Whatever specific decisions we make, we have a great opportunity to show our world that it is Christ, and not image or brand or outrage, that is our consuming passion.
This article originally appeared here.
