Social Media Is Hell: How the Web 2.0 is a Medium of Selfishness and Why it Matters
Social Media is Hell:
How the Web 2.0 is a Medium of Selfishness and Why it Matters
This is the essay I did not want to write. I love social media as much as the next American twenty something, making an effort to post my photography on Instagram once a day, happily Snapchatting away throughout the mundane and momentous moments of my day, and checking Facebook first thing in the morning, before bed, and during any moment of boredom in between. I dreaded this research because of the conviction I was sure would follow. However, I suspected that my fraying concentration and inability to endure discomfort or boredom without the aid of my phone pointed to a deeper issue for me and thousands of my peers, and so my work began. After months of research, hours of conversations, and two weeks without social media, these are my conclusions:The pervasiveness of the American consumeristic mindset leads us to apply advertising tactics in our personal lives as best exemplified through social media, resulting in a form of self-branding and self-publishing that creates a hellish, continually inward-focused worldview; therefore we must seek to hold informed views and responsible practices regarding social media and technology.
Social media imitates America
Since the founding of our country we have been surrounded by advertising, and it has only grown, to the point where America spent 200 billion dollars on advertising in 2016. We are advertised to almost constantly; from highway billboards to television spots to the ever increasing advertising market of the internet, we as Americans are constantly bombarded with persuasive attempts to gain our attention, loyalty, and ultimately our income.
The American consumerist mindset has reached into every part of daily life and shaped the way we see much of the world, without our even realizing.
Inevitably, this constant advertising that has infiltrated our country and economy has, for better or worse, shaped our culture as well. We are a consumeristic culture, meaning a culture driven and shaped by the forces of supply and demand, selling and buying. According to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, a consumerist culture values mobility rather than duration and stability, and newness over endurance. The American consumerist mindset has reached into every part of daily life and shaped the way we see much of the world, without our even realizing. Consumerism is our economic system, but it has also become our worldview. And this is not without effect:
We are learning to market ourselves
When we daily, from almost our first moments of life, are taught to see the world as a place to buy and sell, we cannot help but begin to see everything through the lenses of buying and selling. We are people who have been taught to consume in all areas of life, including religion and relationships. We see every aspect of life as something that has been placed there to benefit us in some way, something for us to use and consume. No longer only our economic system, consumerism has become the American worldview - the framework through which we interpret everything else, ultimately including God, the gospel, and church. Consumerism, as Pete Ward concludes, "represents an alternative source of meaning to the Christian gospel."
We are so constantly marketed to that we become marketers of ourselves.
Consumerism subconsciously teaches us that things and people are there for our benefit, and when we see people as something to use, we learn how to work people to our advantage. We “buy” and “consume” people, choosing to engage in relationships that fit our needs, and we learn how to “sell” ourselves to others in order to be perceived and treated the way we want. We are so constantly marketed to that we become marketers of ourselves. And the most convenient and increasingly popular way to do so is through our personal social medias.Take Facebook, for example: “what started off as an address book to find lost friends and schoolmates has turned into a massive self-branding exercise,” writes Zadie Smith in her widely read review of the film The Social Network. When a person creates a Facebook account, they reduce themselves into a set of data, and their personhood shrinks. “In a way it’s a transcendent experience,” writes Smith: “we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.”Language of “self-branding” and “self-promotion” have become common to technology writers and thinkers, referring to the way we sell certain perceptions of ourselves online. This has become even clearer with the development of the web 2.0, or the second generation of the internet that we currently use, characterized by customizable and user generated content such as blogs and social networking sites. On the internet we control what people see, editing our persona and controlling the depth and commitment of our relationships. As Alice E. Marwick discusses in her book, Status Update, what the tech community sees as exciting about the web is its potential for participation, or “its ability to empower regular people to garner as much attention as big companies and huge brands.” Suddenly personalities are flattened into “brands”, real human lifestyles into mere labels. We pick our online persona, choose photos that show curated aspects of our lives, and decide our aesthetic and tone.Living in a consumeristic culture has taught us to be marketers of ourselves through social media, and this is also not without effect.
Social media is the new narcotic
We live in an age when our technology and social media is actually designed to addict us. We are daily losing our ability to not rely on our technology.In an intriguing article by Bianca Bosker, Tristan Harris, a former product philosopher at Google, explains the addictiveness that is built into our technology. Rather than blaming our tech addiction on a stunning lack of self-control, this article uncovers how that itch to glance at our phone is a product of countless apps and websites designed to keep us scrolling. Saying that we should just exercise more self-control with our apps ignores that the programmers are being paid to psychologically hook us and break down whatever control we hold. “We’ve lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us,” writes Bosker. App developers and social media designers have learned that more of our screen time means more advertising dollars for them, and they are using it to their advantage. “Zuckerberg’s business model depends on our shifting notions of privacy, revelation, and sheer self-display. The more that people are willing to put online, the more money his site can make from advertisers”, writes Jose Antonio Vargas in an article for the New Yorker. Instead of using technology to offer empowering choices to make daily life easier, developers are designing our media to offer choices that psychologically trap us into giving more and more of our time to the screens.
We have begun to use the chemical relief of social media to deal with the stresses and sorrows of everyday life, and inadvertently addicted ourselves in the process.
A highly addictive, numbing chemical called dopamine is released in the brain while people participating in activities such as smoking, drinking, or gambling, activities so dangerously addictive that they have an age restriction. However, social media is proven to release the same addictive chemical whenever we receive an affirming like or comment. We have begun to use the chemical relief of social media to deal with the stresses and sorrows of everyday life, and inadvertently addicted ourselves in the process. Because companies profit from seizing and maintaining our focus, they have begun to use tactics to engage and addict us at the biological level. Some even go so far as to call the persuasive tactics built into social media “hijacking techniques”—the digital equivalent of filling junk food with sugar, salt, and fat to trap consumers into coming back for more and more. Fast food restaurants try to hook customers us by appealing to natural craving for certain flavors; social media hooks us by delivering what psychologists call “variable rewards.” New messages, photos, and “likes” appear on no set schedule, so we check for them compulsively, never sure when we’ll receive a dopamine-activating prize. We increasingly rely on our phones for our moment-to-moment choices about who we’re hanging out with, what we should be thinking about, who we owe a response to, and what’s important in our lives. We turn to Google for information often before we think, and tweet before we can even speak. We don’t even realize the power we are giving to our technology; we are practically allowing our phones to function as a brain implant, with the average millennial checking their phone more than 150 times a day. Since 2010, we’ve spent an increasing amount of time with our mobile devices, to the point where we now refer to them constantly, and millennial’s obsessive habits are not predicted to stop any time soon.
Social media is a false world to live in
Not only is social media an incredibly addictive world to live in, it is also a false one. We are helplessly teaching ourselves to be self-focused. As said before, social media flattens personhood, and develops a skewed view of reality for its users. Just as I choose my online brand, everyone else does as well, and consciously or not, I begin to see them as nothing more than their flat, online personality. Programing expert and father of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, wrote the prophetic and alarming book You Are Not a Gadget in which he speaks into the phenomenon of the ways that people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. “Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality,” he writes.
When we see the world often or only through this lens of social media, we lose our ability to see the true scope of the people around us and the world.
He goes on to write that, “online culture is one of reaction, not action.” When we see the world often or only through this lens of social media, we lose our ability to see the true scope of the people around us and the world. The trap is that, unless consciously aware, we end up thinking that what we are viewing on social media is the whole of the world. A majority of U.S. adults get their news on social media, with half of Americans reporting that they received news on the 2016 election cycle from social media. 18-34 year olds now spend 4.3 times more time on social media than with TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and books combined. Social media is changing how we view and understand news, most significantly by placing our personal news on the same level as national and world news. Your new puppy looks equally important as your neighbor’s grandmother’s passing and the Syrian refugee crisis. This is not to say that the little details of your life are not important, but that social media is creating a false sense of significance.We are allowed to view the world in light of ourselves and our news first, creating in each of us is what I call the “inward focused worldview.” We enter social media through our own personal profiles, and news is filtered to us through that lens. You are handed all of the information in the world and given the power to decide how it relates to you. But that’s not how the world works at all.
Social media is hell
Social media is hell. No, really. Hear me out.CS Lewis, in his foreword to The Screwtape Letters, philosophizes about the idea of Hell as less of a spiritual destination and more of a state of being. He views Hell as a state in which everyone is perpetually and obsessively concerned about his own advancement, and where everyone lives controlled by envy and self-importance. He writes: “I feign that devils can, in a spiritual sense, eat one another; and us. Even in human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest one's fellow, to make his whole intellectual and emotional life merely an extension of one's own.”
This is what social media does for us: it makes others into nothing but mere extensions of ourselves.
I propose that this is what social media does for us: it makes others into nothing but mere extensions of ourselves. The reality of others matters only to the extent in which it touches our reality. Humans already have trouble feeling compassion to others outside ourselves, but the problem is worsened by adding the distance of a screen. Flat photographs and black and white letters describe the joys and woes of others to us as we lose our ability for true compassion and true human connection. We don’t see our “friends” as much more than people we scroll past daily. We can click to show our “love,” instead of investing in people’s lives in a real and costly way. We join social movements, but often only “care” for only as long as it takes us to type #prayforparis or #kony2012. Social media makes this especially clear in times of tragedy. In our hyper-connected world we seek to care and be a part of every meaningful thing that happens daily. But when horrible tragedy strikes, people jump to “participate” in the event, often flattening people’s real pain into nothing but another internet “event”. Millions of people with no real connection to this bombing or those victims will throw out their two cents, benefiting no one but themselves. We make noise on any topic, sometimes spreading false information in the process, just for the sake of having something to say. In a way, we turn other’s pain into our selfish entertainment.In these ways, social media is a lot like hell; it definitely isn’t heaven.Terence McKenna, 21st century American philosopher, held strong views on mass-consumerist cultures. He describes civilization like “6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in.” He goes on to explain that when we naively choose to embrace the dehumanizing values that are handed down to us and are so embedded in our own culture, we often lose the capability to stand back and see what we are doing to each other.
Hell is self-centeredness at the cost of others.
Whichever metaphor works better - eating each other in an attempt to get ahead or kicking each other’s teeth in, the picture is the same. Hell is self-centeredness at the cost of others. George MacDonald, Scottish author and large inspiration to much of Lewis’s writings on hell, said it simply: “The one principle of hell is – ‘I am my own’.”
We are running from love’s responsibility
We are fighting to yank back our attention from technologies engineered to ensnare us, and meanwhile we are also fighting spiritual battles for our will. Acedia is the often forgotten spiritual vice which comes from a Greek word usually translated “sloth” but is usually used to refer to the spiritual side of sloth, or “spiritual apathy.” It describes the state of complete uncaring, ultimately losing the ability to mind that you don’t care. It is like a spiritual version of mindless social media scrolling. The problem of acedia “is personal and communal, innate and institutional, as old as the desert and as new as the iPhone, hard to recognize in ourselves and yet impossible to miss in our culture as a whole,” Jonathan Sands Wise writes in Diagnosing Acedia and Its Spiritual Neighbors,
We set our soul’s true longing on lazy pleasures instead of our true fulfillment, found in meaningful connection with God and others.
Acedia creates a void that we try to fill with lazy pleasures instead of finding it’s true fulfilment in God. Our lazy pleasures cannot fill the void created by our lack of striving to live in the love and friendship of God. As Lewis famously pens, we are like children content to play in the mud because “we are far too easily pleased.” We set our soul’s true longing on lazy pleasures instead of our true fulfillment, found in meaningful connection with God and others. We are content to lazily love across screens, only caring about others to the extent that they are connected to us.Acedia tempts us to run away from love’s responsibility. Because love is responsibility. Being a truly caring human being is work. We have learned to avoid deep, meaningful relationships because we are learning to turn to our technology for an illusion of affirmation, and we settle for temporary relief from our sufferings in social media instead of struggling and growing in community with the body of Christ.While we cannot blame the American church’s adecia and selfishness solely on social media, maybe they go hand in hand. The selfish culture of consuming and lack of true caring in America feeds our social media addiction, which then confirms our twisted, inward focused worldview, which goes on to feed our acedia more.
We were not made for hell
We are not made to live in hell. We are not made to be choosing to devour and consume at other’s expense, constantly fighting to win some imaginary contest in life. We are not made to flatten our personalities or reduce our personhood through social media in some vain attempt to get ahead. We are not made to be trapped in a dumbing medium that only serves our selfish purposes.The beautiful way that God has set up our personhood is that we are designed to find our fullness in being united to God, but still maintaining our unique personalities and dignified person hoods. We are not meant to lose our identity in our life and union in Christ, but instead to find the fulfillment of our God-given and unique existing identity. The same is true for our brothers and sisters in Christ; we do not lose our identity in serving and communing with others, but we become more truly ourselves through our service.
The logic of heaven seeks to give life, not devour it. It gives to receive, dies to live, loves when unloved, and forgives when wronged.
The logic of hell desires to consume. It moves us to take everything we can in order to grow our own lusts and perceived well-being, and to isolate ourselves from meaningful connection to others. The logic of heaven seeks to give life, not devour it. It gives to receive, dies to live, loves when unloved, and forgives when wronged.We are children of heaven. We are to be focused outward, not inward. There are no neutral activities in God’s kingdom. Every pastime is either life-giving to the Body and glorifying to the Father, or turning our worldview and actions further inward towards a hellish reality. Everything about marketing ourselves and focusing on our own self-advancement is not of the heavenly kingdom. While social media can offer many benefits to the world, it is a medium that lends itself easily to addiction, self-obsession, and a skewed view of reality, ultimately at the cost of ourselves and others.
Hope for our socials and for ourselves
Believing in Jesus Christ means believing in hope, and we believe believe in a hope strong enough for both our social medias and for ourselves. Most importantly, however, we need to be aware of the flaws of this medium. We cannot defend ourselves from what we do not know. We must be aware of the physiologically addicting qualities of our social media as well as the way it taints our view of reality, because if we are not aware of how the medium affects us, we have no hope of being good stewards and responsible users.
Everyone is influenced in some way by the technology present in their life and would do well to spend some time critically thinking about the impact of their social media on their worldview and life.
Perhaps not every person who has a social media profile or a cell phone is completely and helplessly addicted, but everyone is influenced in some way by the technology present in their life and would do well to spend some time critically thinking about the impact of their social media on their worldview and life. Education is a helpful first step. For those who desire to learn more about the addictiveness of their technology and the psychological and physiological tactics many apps use to hook their user's brains, start by slowly and mindfully thinking through these great articles and videos: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5Secondly, a social media fast can be helpful to reveal just how addicted you might be. Have a friend change your passwords and delete your apps for a few weeks or a month as a detox for your brain and your worldview. Note the things that make you search for the missing Facebook icon - you might be surprised how uncomfortable situations, bad news, or boring conversation will all make you grab for your phone. Resist the urge to replace Instagram scrolling with Pinterest scrolling, email checking, or Netflix watching (it maybe be helpful to detox from all online entertainment as well as social media during this time). Embrace the boredom, sadness, or discomfort instead of numbing it with electronic stimulation, and in time you will learn that these are all bearable, and often productive, emotions. Also pay attention to how your perceptions may change about the value of yourself, others, and what things are worthy of your time and energy.After your detox is done, reevaluate your social media use. You may decide to stay off certain social media or to continue use with guidelines in place, such as access only available through your computer instead of phone apps or a half hour time limit a day. I have instituted a social media “Sabbath”, deciding to taking a rest from my scrolling each Sunday and using the day to weekly re-evaluate how my perceptions of myself and others may have been influenced that week. You may choose to leave your phone at home for certain events that require your full attention (I promise you can get through Sunday morning church or dinner with your friend without your cell) or make a commitment to avoid social media click-bait and only receive your news through reliable sources.And thirdly, pray, not only for the power of the Holy Spirit to produce self-control in this and all areas of your life, but also for the wisdom and discernment to know which platforms you personally should be using to serve others and how you can do this well. Institute a weekly or monthly check-in, where you again re-evaluate the amount of time you are spending with your social media and technology, the value you are placing in your online life, and the ways your worldview may be curling inward.The question is not really if we are going to use the web 2.0, but how we are going to use it. Every new technology throughout history has been been accompanied by doomsayers who refused to advance with the times for fear of the dangers and unknowns of the new medium, including the invention of television, the printing press and even the alphabet. But of course, those doubters could not imagine the incredible benefits that accompanied their reasonably well-grounded fears. It is hard to picture our world today without the blessings of the written word and the printing press, and even harder to imagine what new wonders the internet will continue to bring.
The Christian has less reason to be afraid of new technologies and cultures than any person alive, but also has more responsibility to be cultured and connected in truly loving and life-giving ways.