Reflections on 2020: Social Media

Hey friends, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast as Michael and I continue our series
on reflections of 2020,
a big one today as we think about social media,
there is no doubt
that we have all been grateful for the social media platforms,
for the technology that has
been utilized throughout this year as we kind of separated from one another and as we encountered
the challenges that we faced during 2020 and COVID specifically,
I don’t know what we would
have done.
For instance, in the church’s case,
literally, I’m not sure what we would have done
without those technologies, without the ability to be in people’s homes,
on their phones, their TVs, their computers.
That was an absolute game changer as we were forced to be a digital congregation
for a significant period of time.
Having said that, I also think that as we have all done more
of that over the last year,
I think most of us have,
it has some drawbacks.
And today we want to talk about,
in fairness,
the upsides and the downsides of our collective experience as people
who use those things and witness them.
And in Michael’s case,
more so than mine,
people who are, to some degree, educated about how they work as well.
And I think that’s a helpful insight as
we have the conversation.
It’s funny, Clint, as you kick us off and you point to the ways that
social media has been,
in some ways, essential to our worshiping life,
certainly how we disseminated
and distributed access to that experience.
I wonder how many people with us now might have heard that
and felt an inward kind of groan,
sort of like, yeah,
yeah, it’s been helpful,
initiate eye roll.
And I think that that in many ways is this nuanced place that we now find ourselves.
We find ourselves in some way beholden to these social experiences.
And in the moment,
I want to broaden that beyond
just the apps on phones,
because I think maybe we over simplify what we mean when we talk about
social media.
But I think there’s a sense in which we have all become tired of some aspect of this
way of relating to one another.
We have full stop without exception.
I don’t know a single person
who’s made an argument that this is a sustainable model,
that we should try to keep distancing.
I think everybody would agree,
even without being pressed,
that we have strained the limits of what
these mediums were intended to be able to carry.
We’ve tried to find ways of communicating
substance in relationship.
And we’ve done that in spaces and in places that simply are not capable
on their own of carrying that weight.
And so now as the church,
and as people who care about
a relationship centered around Christ,
I think there’s a lot to dissect,
to sort of pick out and
to ask questions about and hopefully at the end,
maybe even give some encouragement as we seek to
to give some thought to what healthy and to what relational value there may be in the future.
But needless to say, to start the conversation,
nobody is coming to this with rainbows and unicorns and
fireworks and balloons that then there’s nobody I think,
who would point to the social media
experience of 2020 and say that was all good,
because it objectively wasn’t.
And yet it also,
I would argue, wasn’t all bad.
And so let’s try to tease out some of these nuances here,
because I think that helps us as we seek to sort of make paths forward from this place.
I think realistically,
for most of us,
it’s a mix of positive and negative.
And I suspect as we have used social media,
we have felt that we were probably thankful to be able to have Zoom calls
with family members while simultaneously being frustrated at what we did or didn’t know
about using Zoom.
I think of my own experience,
I have historically not been a big social media guy,
I don’t have a Twitter account,
I don’t use Facebook,
or at least had not very often.
And during this year,
far more than ever before.
And I think my experience is probably normative,
there is this amazing whiplash that happens when in the same column or even next to each other,
you have on one hand,
a birth announcement and a picture of someone’s child that you care about,
and you’re happy and you’re celebrating with them.
And then the next very post is a rant about
something that you wish you hadn’t seen and you think,
“What in the world?” And just the
kind of back and forth that happens and all of that,
the incredible thing about social media
is how condensed that becomes.
And in 15 minutes online,
you can have a day or even days worth
of interaction and experience,
but they’re not exactly personal interactions, they’re informational interactions.
And I do think that changes.
And we’ve struggled a great deal in the church with,
to what extent can social media carry relationships?
And I think one of the things it
forced us to do in the church was to explore that.
And I think we had some success.
I think for some
people, it very much provided a way for them to continue to feel connected to the larger body at
a time when they wouldn’t have otherwise.
But that’s not to say it doesn’t have its headaches.
So one of the core theological tenets of Christianity is incarnation,
the idea that God took on flesh,
that Jesus was fully man and fully human.
And this is relevant in this
conversation because ultimately social media is not an incarnational experience.
It is one that is mediated.
There’s something in between you and the other people.
And what I’ve always found
interesting about social media is that you get to pick the image that represents you.
And think about how funny that would be if you got to come to church and you got to pick and print and then
hold the mask in front of your face that other people saw when they were going to talk to you.
We would find that hilarious.
You’re stuck with the face that you have,
like it or not,
maybe you put on some makeup or maybe you try to get your hair right.
But ultimately, we have what we have.
Not so in this mediated medium.
You get to choose the face that you put
forward in front of other people.
And on one hand,
that sort of encourages this latent narcissism
that is in all of us.
This idea that we want to look good,
we want others to think a particular way of us.
We want to present to the world a certain kind of life.
This is just a basic human temptation.
It has, I think, an interesting and unexpected reverse implication.
However,
other people know that they’re looking at a picture that you chose.
They know that they’re
talking to an avatar.
You’re not in the room with them.
And I think this helps us to begin to
understand why some of the social conventions that generally keep us relatively hospitable
towards one another, we generally think about what we say when another person is two feet away from
us.
Because we know that when we say it,
we’re going to see the pain in their eyes if we say
something hurtful or we know that if we say something that is extremist or incendiary,
that the other people in the room are going to sort of tamp that down.
Not so on social media.
We know we’re talking to someone’s chosen mask.
And because of that,
there’s a distance between us and them.
And I think it helps us to see why some people do feel more comfortable
saying a sharply worded thing.
They’re comfortable, in some cases, literally using words to attack
another person’s character or thoughts or simply just another person’s presence in that space.
And they know that they’re not going to beholden to that other person’s immediate response.
They’re not going to see the pain in their eyes.
In fact, there may be others in the online community who
don’t even know this person or have a relationship with them who are going to then jump in and be on the same side.
And so suddenly, there’s this sort of strength in numbers,
a sort of hidden in
anonymity kind of force happening.
And we begin to see how what could be good,
it could be a moment
of communication and relationship can so quickly turn into distance,
and quite frankly, an opportunity to cut one another down.
And I think all of us on some level,
whether that’s on Facebook or Twitter,
or even quite frankly,
YouTube or somewhere else,
we’ve seen this happen in the last year.
Yeah, I think very much social media as an observer seems to be a good platform for
disseminating ideas.
I’m not sure I would say that it is a good platform for building
relationships that it’s not that it’s not possible.
It’s not that it’s not capable.
It’s that it’s very difficult because the interactions are so different.
It they happen, not only between individuals, but then there’s this broader community who are not really vested in the
relationship in the same way.
And it becomes so often a dogpile of people’s,
you know, their own perspectives and their kind of unique way of seeing things that is maybe productive in a
group if you were sitting with a group of people hashing over ideas and sharing a meal together.
But it quickly has a it is very hard as an observer to see how quickly it goes negative.
And that’s not built into the system.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
But it has
sort of been Facebook,
particularly, I think has been a an arena in which argument and
accusation and insult is very common,
very prevalent and and frustrating.
You know,
again,
a few of us may participate in that.
I think most of us probably try not to.
And it it just gets exhausting as we see it happen.
And I don’t think that particular aspect of social media
is not conducive to relational building at all in my experience.
Right. And this is, I think, where I want to just pause quickly,
sort of put a footnote here and just make note that there are
some joining us who say,
hey, I don’t have a Facebook account.
Never did.
Some are going to
say, you know what, I deleted Facebook and I got off because it wasn’t good.
And I don’t even know
what Twitter is.
And what is Snapchat?
And, you know, I think there’s all of these different
experiences of this time.
Some people are all in on it.
Some people have tried to get as far away
from it as possible.
And if you’re one of those who’ve sort of tried to distance yourself from
social media, I want to make the case that this conversation is still relevant for you for two reasons.
One,
because inevitably,
you are relating to people in the quote unquote real world who are
being shaped and formed by their experience on social media.
You don’t need to be on it for the
culture and community around you to be formed by it.
Though you may not be aware of it.
There are conversations happening that that many people,
in fact, you may say a majority of people in the
community are watching as significant people are arguing with one another or cutting one another
down or sort of flinging insults across the aisle.
And that gets carried with them when they go into
the real life grocery store,
when they see each other,
just because that was a virtual conversation
doesn’t mean it’s not a meaningful conversation.
So you don’t need to be on social media for it to
have shaped the world in which we live.
And so therefore, this topic should be one of importance for you.
The second is that ultimately,
social media affects us,
I think, in very, very nuanced ways that we are not quick to see.
Maybe you don’t have a smartphone.
Maybe on your smartphone,
you don’t have any of these traditional apps.
But yet you do watch the traditional news on your television,
or maybe you have a magazine subscription,
or maybe you read the print newspaper,
or however it is that you sort of engage with the world outside your own circle.
And what we miss is many,
if not all of these companies have been directly affected by the
rise and significance of social media so that a lot of reporting that happens on the national scene
actually includes real footage from people’s cell phones that somebody had a smartphone camera,
recorded a thing, shared that on a social media network.
And now the national press of all kinds
of all stripes and all biases,
they are using literally that material,
which then their spokespeople will interpret or offer opinions on or seek to put together in a more coherent narrative.
The fact that the smartphone camera has existed for the last 10 years has already been written
about in academic works as being one of the most significant forces of social change
in the modern era.
Because the camera enables experiences for other people to have that was
simply not possible when someone gave a written interview.
When you can see emotion,
when you can see situations unfold,
it captures the attention and draws you into a story in a way that was not
possible.
Now the danger with that is to think just because you saw it on a camera,
you know what happened.
And that is another I think unfortunate side effect is that once that gets funneled into
our larger conversations and then is disseminated by these more traditional mediums,
we begin to think that what you see is 100% the truth of what happened.
And anybody who really has given some
thought and research to these matters knows that one small camera frame cannot possibly collect all
of the different advantages of what happens in the moment.
And yet these things are shaping our
communal conscience and our larger vision.
And so I think it’s important to recognize we’re all in
this conversation in some way.
It’s affected our life even if not directly.
And that I think gives
us reason to slow down and to ask some deeper questions about this thing so that we can engage
in it in responsible ways just as people who live in this space,
in this world, but also later as we
turn to look at it from a Christian vantage.
And none of this is new.
Pictures have always conveyed meaning.
News articles, outlets have always chosen what facts they would include,
what slant they would include.
The idea of information being neutral has always been a
struggle for the human family,
but it is exponentially increased now.
Maybe you’ve had this experience.
This drives me crazy.
There’ll be some news story and they’ll just
quote what a person on Twitter thinks about it.
Well,
Clint Lovell 71 says this,
“Well, nobody should care what Clint Lovell says about a national news story.
I don’t have the chops
to have any authoritative say in all I have is my opinion.” And this is the point that I think I’m
trying to make is one of the dangerous things that social media does without us often being
aware of it is validates my opinion and equates it with fact so that I can put it out there,
I can see it,
I can disseminate it,
and I can state it as if it is unequivocally true.
And social media
allows me that opportunity at multiple levels.
And as I do that,
I gain this sort of
combative confidence in which opinion becomes in some ways more important than the actual truth of the matter.
And I think we need to be aware,
and again, this isn’t to dogpile social media,
this is to say we need to be aware of the tendencies it creates in us because if we don’t,
we are unconsciously being herded in a direction and it doesn’t feel like we’re being herded.
We feel like we have the reins when in reality the trail that we’re riding has already been
designed to take us a certain direction and we didn’t choose it.
We think we did,
but we didn’t choose it.
And that’s dangerous.
Yeah, let’s peel back the curtain a little bit on this, Clint,
because I think one of the greatest
misnomers of social media for most folks is they believe that you and I,
the people who have
social media on our apps or on our phones,
if that’s the thing that you have,
that we are Facebook’s customer,
that ultimately Facebook has a relationship with us and that they are there to
provide us services and apps and that we are the people who are a sort of that Facebook is
designed to serve.
That is a hundred percent false.
It’s only indirectly true.
Facebook’s customers are marketers and advertisers.
And this is easy to intuit when you remember how much do
you pay to use Facebook?
Nothing.
It’s free to install.
It’s free to use every month.
There’s what makes social media financially and economically different from a newspaper.
How much do you pay for the Dickinson County News?
It costs you a certain amount per month.
You are therefore in a customer relationship with the newspaper.
Now, they also have customers who
are advertisers and they live in a tricky spot.
If you look at the history of news in America,
they have historically walked that tension between advertisers and subscribers in a very
interesting, tenuous way.
Different people have taken different tax,
but they’re beholden to both.
Facebook exists for the purpose of us using their services so that they might sell our attention
to marketers and those marketers can then profit off of that attention and time.
So we are the
product given to marketers.
We’re not in a service relationship with the company.
It’s only because we find the connections in that space valuable that therefore we continue to
remain connected.
But ultimately, we need to remember that Facebook is seeking as well as
YouTube, as well as Twitter.
I’m not trying to sort of single them out.
They have a relationship
with marketers and that is their economic stimulus.
Now, to your point, Clint,
ultimately, what that means is that what Facebook cares about as well as Twitter as well as YouTube is not so
much are you happy,
but are you staying engaged on your on their service?
Because the longer your
eyes are on their app,
the more advertisers that they will be able to put in front of your eyes during that time.
And ultimately,
we become commoditized and our attention and time becomes
literally monetized as some people pay for the privilege of getting to have their thing in front
of us.
And Facebook delivers that to the marketers.
Google delivers that to them.
And that’s how they
make money from their service.
And so therefore,
and I’m wrapping this up here,
therefore, it is in their best interest to find ways to drive our attention so that we stay in the circle longer.
And this is where these things behind the scenes happen that lead us to believe that we’re following
a path that we chose.
But instead, they’re sort of helping go along the way so that we make sure
they make sure that the most amount of time possible is spent engaging with those marketers materials.
And imagine so if we go back to this idea of a newspaper,
imagine that a newspaper
is printing a copy,
and they have a guy who likes hunting and fishing and rides bicycles,
and they have a person that sells bicycles that wants to advertise.
But then they have another subscriber
who likes computer games and coffee,
and they have a person who sells coffee.
And the newspaper has to decide, okay,
how do we what stories do we put in to try and capture everyone’s attention?
Now imagine that they have the ability to print an individual newspaper for every single person,
and pull in the advertisers that represent their deepest interests,
which they know from the stuff
that you have looked at before in their newspaper.
And so now Michael’s getting his own newspaper,
and guess what stories of stuff he loves and coffee advertisements,
I’m getting mine with
stories of stuff that’s important to me.
Oh, and by the way,
this guy sells bicycles.
And that happens every time that you log on to a platform that is all going on in the background.
And it is all designed to get you to stay on there.
So we have to we have to be honest about that.
The intention is not to bring us news is not even to entertain us,
the sole intention of the platform
is how long can it keep us there.
And in some instances,
it doesn’t care too much about that.
If you’ve ever if you’re a cook,
if you’ve ever looked up a recipe,
you may be frustrated to find
out that almost inevitably,
you have to go down,
down, down, down, down the page to get to the recipe.
And you think, why don’t they put it at the top?
Because then you spend less time on the
page and you scroll by all those ads.
Yeah, you they pay for you to take an extra minute to find
the recipe at the bottom of the page.
And if you know that,
you understand what’s happening.
If you don’t know that, then you are at risk of not realizing that you’re not seeing the full breadth
of information when you get on a media site,
you’re getting the slice that they believe you’re interested in.
And that is the place,
Michael, where I think we can use words,
maybe dangerous is an overstatement.
But certainly, there’s some risk in not understanding that that is a slope that there is,
they’re always looking for us to move the next step in the process.
And when we’re not aware of that,
then I think we are,
we’re in danger of being naive.
Yeah, and I don’t want to,
it all sound fatalist here.
But we all want to believe,
and I am in this number,
that we are smart enough and savvy enough to know when we are being directed,
we all believe that we think things
through, we’re pretty rational people,
we try to be logical people,
and we trust our intuition when
the thing is not right.
This is really a massive technical problem that if you understand just a
small bit of it,
you sort of recognize the issue.
Because think about it,
I think I just looked the
other day I was passing by a number,
I think I have like 700 something Facebook friends.
And so Facebook thinks that there’s 700 people that I’m interested in what they have to say.
Let’s say in a given day, half of those people post something that’s 350 posts a day.
Now,
bear bear with me,
let’s say that I spend on an average day 30 minutes on Facebook,
I don’t know if that’s true,
but let’s say that that’s true.
There’s no way I get through 350 videos, pictures, posts,
comments underneath them.
There’s no way.
So what does Facebook do?
Facebook technically has to figure
out a way to choose which of those 350 things to put at the highest level so that I see it.
And they want to pick the thing that’s most likely most interesting so that I keep coming back.
Here’s the problem.
When they leave out 280 of the 350,
that’s a choice that you didn’t make.
They made that choice.
In fact, this thing called an algorithm or software made that choice.
And
so that they get as close as they think they can to the thing that you would have picked if you saw all 350.
Because if you are happy,
then you stay longer and they make money from the advertisers
who get the privilege of being in front of your time on the screen.
This is a very rudimentary
way of describing what is called the attention economy.
And if you’re interested in this,
that may be a place to study.
This is just barely scratching the surface.
The point is, friends, that ultimately it’s not just evil corporations doing evil things.
They’re trying to solve a problem.
350 posts have to get condensed into the top 20 and they make choices as to which
ones it should be.
The problem is I believe that I,
seeing those 20 posts,
are making determinations about, well, that seems right.
And that seems wrong.
I like that.
I don’t like that.
What I don’t realize is the huge majority of things that I’m not making decisions about because it was
never showed to me.
And you can already see how this becomes a problem because if they begin
showing you 30, 40, 50 of the things that lead you down this road,
you don’t even have these
other conversations to offset it.
And that is beginning to be the sort of the wheel that turns
us towards more and more extremist content.
And I don’t mean that just like politically or
economically.
It’s just social media has a way,
as you were saying,
Clint, of sort of fine-tuning
the conversation down to the point where they think you’re going to be happiest.
And that unfortunately tends to also be simultaneously the place with the least amount of nuance and diversity.
Yeah. So imagine you walk into a library and there are hundreds of books about
Abraham Lincoln and the librarian says,
well, you want an Abraham Lincoln book.
Do you think Abraham Lincoln was generally good or do you think there was a little bit suspect?
And you say, I think good.
Well, here’s a good book on Lincoln.
The next suggestion won’t be,
hey, here’s some of the downside of Abraham Lincoln to balance it.
The next suggestion will be,
here’s another book about how good Lincoln was.
And here’s two more books about how great he was.
And here’s a book that says he was the best president in history.
And you think you’re
reading about Abraham Lincoln,
but you’re reading this stuff about Abraham Lincoln,
because it has been decided for you by the librarian that you’re not interested in the
other side of the conversation.
And you can imagine how the implications for something
like that when you come to major issues of our day,
climate change,
COVID,
political stuff,
that when you think you’re seeing the full range of information,
you have to stop.
And unless you have made specific attempts to do that,
it is very likely that you are operating only within
a small band of what’s out there,
because the platform has,
based on your prior interactions with it,
said,
oh, you might like this.
And oh,
we joked earlier,
you like red M&Ms.
Here’s 10 million shades of red.
And you’ll forget that other colors of M&Ms even exist, because it
believes that it’s doing you a favor by taking you to what you want,
which is also then
doing a favor for those who are advertising while you’re there.
And this conversation has been put in this sequence of conversations intentionally,
because social media, I do think it does not carry the full weight of the divisiveness that we’ve seen
in these times.
That was our discussion for last week.
If you missed that,
make sure to jump back
and listen to that.
But it is responsible for some of the gas that’s been thrown on it because
the more and more that you move people to a very fine sort of set of conversations,
people are more and more likely to take a very extremist– and by extremist,
once again, I mean just a non-nuanced perspective that there are other people who may see it from a different
vantage.
You start talking about things like,
well, this is the truth.
And you miss that in your
speaking of that truth,
you may be foreclosing on other data that you don’t even, by definition,
know exists.
And that is really,
really important because it’s the illusion of having read and studied.
Because,
Clinton, you may have read 18 books on Abraham Lincoln.
The problem is it was a very select group of books on Abraham Lincoln.
And that’s exactly what happens.
When you click on one news article,
you’re going to get 18 more of news articles from people who are
generally ideologically connected to that article.
Why?
You read one.
You’re probably going to like these next 18.
And once again, I don’t want to dogpile here on social media,
but I think this
framework is necessary to understand the next essential point.
And that is ultimately,
you said it, Clint,
when we come to this space,
we must be mindful and take agency for what we are doing.
And that’s exactly the thing that I think all of us are tempted.
I think everyone is included in this.
We are all tempted to go to these platforms for entertainment,
not for thinking and not for
engagement.
In other words, when you pull up the Facebook app, you don’t think,
all right,
time to start getting my interpretive lens out to really engage with my world.
No,
you pull up Facebook because you want to see a funny cat video.
You want to celebrate with
a person who had a baby or that funny story of a thing that happened.
And this is, this is good.
It’s good to have entertainment,
but it is a very fine line when we switch from entertainment,
like watching America’s funniest home videos on your TV,
to now consuming articles,
to reading posts that contain people’s thoughts.
And you start to have your worldview shaped about what is true
and not what is helpful and what isn’t,
who is good and who is evil.
These things begin to work
within us.
And we begin to believe,
well, that person thought that,
and therefore I should think
this instead of recognizing that when we,
when we turn on these apps,
we actually need to go into overdrive,
becoming aware of what voice am I not hearing?
Whose perspective is not honored in this situation.
I know that this person thought that,
but who might think differently?
And that is work
you have to do.
We have to be responsible for that.
It requires more agency than less.
And I don’t think that’s what we intend to do when we open up these apps.
No, I think very few people
interact with social media understanding that it is designed to put in front of them things
that they will most likely agree with.
That you are,
in some sense,
signing on to,
here’s 50 people who think like you do based on what we know about you.
And so we think that
you’ll like their stuff.
But again,
that’s not done out of neutrality.
That’s not done out of
correctness or factuality.
That is done out of claiming your time.
And what can happen in that
is, again, this illusion that I’m getting to truth,
that I’m starting at a neutral place,
and I search some topic.
And it says, well, based on your previous searches,
we think you’ll probably put this spin on the topic.
So here’s a few articles that we think
you’ll probably agree with.
And again,
now I have participated in something that is by definition,
over and over and over again,
validating my opinion,
not bringing me facts.
It’s not its intention to bring me facts.
It’s intention to bring me what I want.
And if we don’t recognize that,
I think we’re very much in danger of confusing where I start from where I end up.
In other words, I start with an opinion,
and then I find material that reinforces that opinion.
And so it only reaffirms the idea that I’m right.
And that is,
I think,
at any level, we have seen that
play itself out.
And I think whatever side of stuff you land on,
this is not pointed at anyone in particular.
It is just to say that these realities are inherent in the mediums,
and we need to be aware of them to use them well.
Social media is a wonderful tool if you understand
what that tool is and how to use it,
but you don’t fix windows with a hammer.
And if you don’t
understand the tool you’re using,
you are very likely in danger of using it wrong.
And this leads me to sort of the,
I think, next point.
And that is ultimately one of the lessons
I’ve learned in this last year,
working with the church’s presence on social media.
We’ve produced literally, at this point,
hundreds of videos that have been on Facebook,
YouTube,
on our website.
And ironically, some of you are watching this on Facebook right now.
And it’s funny, as we talk about Facebook, this is being beamed to you through their servers.
You’re giving them time
on their platform so that you can engage with us.
And this is where this gets really nuanced
and interesting.
Because one of the things about coming to church,
being in our sanctuary, physically,
sitting in the pew,
or coming over here to our fireside room,
where we’ll have adult education classes,
is once you come into the room,
a certain level of distraction naturally goes away.
You don’t have the radio in the background because we don’t play the radio during church.
You don’t have other
people’s chatter and spin sort of clouding your mind because we’re seeking to hear one another
listen, learn, all these kinds of things.
That’s what happens in physical spaces.
What has struck me as we’ve produced all of these sort of videos and we’ve tried to be thoughtful,
you know, right now we’re sitting somewhere around,
after 35 minutes of content,
a lot of people on Facebook,
and we know this because we can see the analytics,
most people don’t make it to minute 35.
Why?
Well, because when you’re on Facebook and you’re scrolling by,
you’ve got three minutes that you
want to give.
You don’t want to watch a 35 minute thing.
There’s too many distractions.
Well, I would rather watch this TV show or hey, look,
under that video, that’s a cute and funny cat.
I want to learn about that cat.
It is challenging when you seek to come onto these platforms with content that
cannot be boiled down with thoughts that are nuanced and for faith,
which speaks to life
experiences that aren’t just like,
well, what do you think?
Well, I think this, I think red M&Ms
are best.
Case closed.
That’s not how we can engage with what it means to be people of faith,
disciples of Jesus Christ.
We know there’s more to it than that.
And yet when we come onto the space
and we put our 30 minute Bible study on Facebook,
the reality is Facebook’s really not made
to help that along.
It’s not designed for you to sit there for 30 minutes.
It’s designed for you
to keep going to see the next thing.
That’s how the advertisers make money.
And so there’s this inherent challenge.
What do people do who are convicted?
That depth of faith is what matters.
Disciples are called to be challenged,
to be engaged, to grow.
What do those people do when
they go onto a space that is designed for an entirely different kind of content?
And that is the struggle that I’ve seen us have.
And we’ve navigated as best as you can.
But all of us,
I think on the practical level,
know, oh, hey, look, it’s a Bible study.
I should watch that.
I don’t have the energy or time to do that right now.
And then it just goes away.
And I think that’s a fascinating sort of reflection on what’s different when you try to be reflective,
when you try to be nuanced in that space.
I think it cuts against that effort.
Yeah, it has been, I think, for this year, a challenge for people to navigate that.
And as we’ve seen so many people driven into that,
I think we have also seen people sort of go
down those patterns.
We often just lose the idea that we’re interacting with people.
It literally is the difference between two-dimensional and three-dimensional.
There’s no depth to it.
And so as Christians,
as people of faith,
we want to bring depth to everything we do.
Including the things we post on Facebook,
the conversations we have,
the things we interact with.
And we want to make sure that those things are in service to our service to Jesus Christ,
and that we are not simply being led to a place that isn’t ultimately helpful as people,
and particularly as people of faith.
And I think that there are lots of resources,
there are lots of tools.
And again, we’re not here to criticize.
I mean,
we are coming to you
on these very platforms,
and we are grateful for that opportunity.
But we need to be aware,
and I think we have seen multiple instances over the past year, all of us,
that there is damage
that happens.
There is danger in the kind of narcissism that social media can foster,
the kind of closedness that you can do,
the ability to segment yourself off and only
hear from and deal with people that you agree with,
the idea to find information that suits
your particular bias and then label it as fact.
I think all of that has to be understood,
because the computer literally doesn’t care what we think,
it cares how long we stay on it.
And if we understand that,
I think we have a better chance of utilizing those tools well,
and even to do good things with them.
And I would argue that they have allowed us to do many good
things during the pandemic.
But unfortunately, they come with some side effects or some additional
costs that sometimes we forget about.
Yeah, and that’s a very helpful term, because once again,
we’re seeking to frame this in a way that is nuanced unto itself.
And I just think it’s
important that we note that there have been people in this time,
people that we could name,
who have come into the fellowship and ministries of First Presbyterian Church,
who were not in it before the pandemic.
And there’s a sense in which social media for all of its downsides,
for all of its dangers,
it has created this unique opportunity where the walls of our sanctuary and
our church building, which on some level, for me, symbolically,
kept people from seeing in,
you had to walk through the doors and sit in the pew to be able to see the gospel at work in this body of faith.
What social media has enabled is for those walls to become transparent.
There are people who were scrolling down on their phones,
saw the good work that was happening by the power of
the spirit.
I mean, once again, this is God at work.
And there was something compelling in it that
drew them further into the fellowship of the church.
Some of these folks are worshipping with
us, studying with us, giving,
engaging in ways that we could have never possibly imagined
before the pandemic.
And so there’s a sense in which these mediums give us an opportunity
to make our walls transparent,
to be inviting to a whole group of people who would have not been
able to engage without it.
And so that is unto itself not an inherent good,
but it is a good.
And I think it’s worth noting that as we go from this place,
one of the difficult tensions to hold
is what parts of a church’s life should you seek to make transparent in that way?
And what parts of a church’s life should be more focused on the cultivation of the flock itself?
You know, what happens within the walls?
What happens outside?
And that I think is a nuanced conversation
that really will shape how you understand education and discipleship and relationship.
There’s no doubt that relational work needs to happen together in person,
in physical, incarnate bodies.
But there’s also ways in which the church can utilize these mediums
that helps us to disseminate the good news in ways we couldn’t have done without them.
And that is a good I don’t think we should just throw out with all of the dangers and inherent
conflicts that we’ve seen in these mediums.
I don’t think there’s any chance that social media is going away anytime soon.
And so it will be
a part of our lives.
And as a part of our lives,
it then is incumbent upon the church to try to
use it well in a way that conveys the care and compassion and service of the gospel.
And that regard a wonderful favor by forcing us to do something we wouldn’t likely have done.
Not just us, but virtually every church has had to navigate some of that water.
And as they have,
they have, I think,
probably learned skills and found some things that work that they now think
we should continue doing.
And I know that that will be the case here.
But with social media
being such a reality in our life, again,
it is important that we understand its limitations,
that we use it well,
and that we understand that we bring our faith to it.
The way that we interact,
the way that we seek truth,
the way that we live out our faith is not exempt when we’re
on the computer.
It doesn’t go away.
We are people to bring Christ to everything that we say
and do, and that includes our phones and our screens and our social media platforms and
presence.
And I think if we could all commit and remember that with an understanding of
some of the challenges inherent in that task,
then we will be better served and the church will be
even better able to use those tools well in service to the faith.
In some ways, I feel like the church having a presence on social media is a little bit like
being a foreigner in a foreign land,
because ultimately this medium was not made for churches
to do the kind of work that we’re seeking to do.
They’re not made to encourage depth.
They’re not made to encourage the kinds of deep soul relationships that we’re called to as disciples of Christ.
So when we go put our education and our worship and some of our reflections on these
spaces, we’re trying to use them in a way that they’re not directly designed to be used,
and that is neither good nor bad.
It’s the reality.
And I do think that one of the things
that we can seek to continue to do as Christians is to try to find the ways to use those tools in
a way that does point others to the grace and the love of Jesus Christ.
And I can just give
a very practical example of this.
When you come to the church and we ask you to fill out the friendship pad,
you know, it’s a way of of symbolically handing your name down the aisle.
So there’s a new person there.
They can see your name.
You can see their name.
You can go and greet one another.
It’s a service of creating a relationship later.
Well, it’s a it’s a weird
kind of analog.
But when you’re watching this video on Facebook,
what really accomplishes that
same purpose isn’t a book.
It’s hitting the like button,
the little thumbs up button and the share button.
It’s weird.
But that’s the thing that tells Facebook,
I want this to be sent out to
my connection so that they can see and engage with the same content.
And if you are connected
to the people at first press,
it’s going to help them see the content.
Same on YouTube.
When you hit the little thumbs up button,
it tells YouTube this is a video that I think that other people in
my circle might want to see.
So it’s a different practice that accomplishes a similar end in that
particular space.
And so I think that one of the practical learnings here is as we seek to try to
learn what does it look like to be nuanced and to try to bring theological truth in the midst of a
time for that kind of discourse.
One of the the outcomes for those who are participating in it
is to literally be social about the media.
How can you share it so that other people in our church
family also get to see it because hitting that button tells Facebook that they should make sure
that other people in the family see it.
This is the kind of thing that we can sort of adapt in
small measure to try to use the tools to the ends of the gospel as opposed to those tools using us
to get people’s attention.
Yeah, and it bears remembering that when you use those platforms,
there are teams of extremely intelligent people that have picked the colors,
the shapes,
the layout,
the content,
all designed with the single focus of keeping us on the site as long as
and as long as you remember that,
I think it helps guide how we use it.
And perhaps it frees us
not to feel so locked into social media.
You know, one of the temptations is to believe that I’m
missing something if I’m not on the site.
And it is one of the great ironies of the internet age
that we have at our disposal,
a tool with which we can see all the greatest artworks of history.
We can learn essentially limitless information about history,
about any field you could think of.
We can be taught incredible things.
And yet,
for most people,
their primary internet experience
is scrolling through who had what for dinner and like it or don’t like it or look at this
article or that article.
And we need to be challenged to do better as people of faith
because that’s the call of the gospel.
And so use the tools,
use them wisely, and understand what is happening when you’re on those sites.
And I think that there is great potential for
the church to have inroads into people’s lives,
even through those aspects.
Well, friends, thanks for joining us for this conversation.
Immediately following this in about
10 minutes, we’re going to be meeting at 7 o’clock where we’ll have a continued discussion.
We would love to see you there.
The link to that video or to that group is in the description of this video.
It’s also been emailed out to subscribers.
So if you haven’t subscribed yet for email updates,
you can do that on our website.
That link is below as well.
But friends, thanks for taking some time to think about these places where we spend so much of our time.
We hope that you’ve
been blessed and we hope that it does spur us to be more thoughtful as disciples of Jesus Christ
as we use these new tools,
might it all be to His glory and honor.
Thanks, everybody.