At the end of December, I had the privilege of spending a few days with over three hundred college students at College Conference, OCF’s incredible annual event. In an atmosphere of prayer and true connection, I thought a bit about social media.
I have a love-hate relationship with social media. On the one hand, it opens access to ideas and people away never before imaginable. On the other, it can provide a platform for mistreating people in new and cruel ways.
I led workshops on the opportunities and challenges that social media presents and presented my basic problem: the challenge social media offers to our struggle for salvation.
In Be the Bee #90 – “How Christ Unites Us,” we discussed some of the writing of St Maximos the Confessor and our challenge to join Christ in reassembling a fragmented world, overcoming the divisions that plague creation and offering all things back up to God. Unfortunately, rather than overcoming these divisions by manifesting God’s love to the world, our sin deepens and hardens these divisions.
And social media seems to add another layer of division, as our analog and digital selves diverge.
On one side, there’s incredible pressure to present a happy face, to present an idealized and romanticized version of oneself: eating fancy food, visiting exotic places, living the sort of life others envy. I recently heard one high school girl describe this as a pressure to both turn herself into a brand and simultaneously be her own brand ambassador, creating clever and desirable content to remain relevant.
If we’re turning our children into Chipotle, products to be marketed, then we have a problem.
On the other side, social media offers a veil of anonymity, behind which the darkest urges can be satisfied. We can both access destructive content and make destructive comments, the sorts of things we’d never say in person.
Even if we’d never have the nerve to say something racist or misogynistic directly to someone’s face, or physically engage in lewd or lustful conduct, the digital world offers the safety of secrecy.
Whatever extreme we choose, the result is an increasingly schizophrenic persona, whereon our digital and analog selves increasingly diverge.
As St Maximos noted, and as we covered in that episode of Be the Bee, our Christian calling involves working with Christ to reassemble a divided and fragmented world. Yet before we can begin to think of unity on a cosmic scale, we must work to attain unity on a personal scale: to overcome the passions which lead us about and make us their slaves, to unite our minds and hearts and bodies and become whole people rather than broken shards of humanity.
In our time, a big part of that is coming to terms with how we use the technological tools that are now available to us. Specifically, what does our social media use say about us, and our path to salvation?