Introduction
On June 20th, 2018, I decided that I would no longer use Facebook for any kind of religious, political, or ideological discussion. I’d had misgivings for a while, but this was the critical moment, indelibly enshrined in the timestamp of a rather disappointing Facebook comment that finally pushed me over the edge.
The comment itself was very short—just a single sentence—and was written by one of the most intelligent, thoughtful, articulate, and productive young scholars I’ve ever had the honor to meet. But in those few words, he reduced himself to a sarcastic, ignorant, uncharitable, contentious attention-seeker. To this day, I remain grateful for his comment, not because of its content (obviously), but because of the clarity with which it highlighted the capacity of at least that particular social media platform (and, it turns out, many others) to generate misunderstanding, discourage careful thought, undermine or displace genuine friendships, encourage hasty knee-jerk reactions to complex issues that in fact require a great deal of careful consideration, and create in the minds of countless well-intentioned but naive people the misconceived notion that they are changing the world when they are merely howling at the moon.
For these and other reasons (which I summarize below), I believe that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and (most of) the rest of the social mediaverse are more trouble than they’re worth, and certainly should not be trusted with anything important. And since religion, politics, and ideology certainly fall into this category, social media platforms ought not to be trusted with any of them.
The irony of the present situation is of course pretty clear, since anything published on the Theopolis blog will likely be shared on social media within minutes. In a paradoxical twist, then, one implication of my argument is that the following paragraphs should never have been written. In my defense, I tried to resist, but the flesh is weak, and Dr Leithart twisted my arm.
So perhaps you’d be kind enough to regard this article as a kind of critique by parody. If you’re reading this when you’ve already been surfing the web for a couple of hours, or when you really ought to be doing something more productive, or at 11:35pm when you ought to be asleep, then you’re living proof that I might just have a point. Above all, if you’re tempted to post a comment right away, barely half a dozen paragraphs in, then I’m not at all sorry that I’ve broken my resolution, because you’re right in the bullseye of the target audience.
But if we’re going to write a parody, we’d better go all in. So here, in a personal anti-tribute to click-bait hacks everywhere, are my Ten Reasons That You’ll Never Believe Why Social Media Is Terrible For Any Kind of Serious Discussion and Pretty Bad In Lots Of Other Ways, Along With A Brief Word In Defense Of Some Notable Exceptions.
It’s Deliberately Addictive
In recent years, social media developers have honed to near-perfection a multitude of features designed to keep you hooked on their product. Features such as infinite scrolling, autoplay video, and those little flashing dots that indicate someone is typing a reply are now deployed with the specific intention of hacking the neural pathways in your brain that give you a sense of accomplishment, reward, and pleasure. Above all, on the other side of that benign-looking six-inch screen lurks a malevolent mountain of supercomputing power designed to feed you exactly what’s needed to keep you online for just a few moments more. That’s why you’re hooked, and it’s probably why you’re reading this right now.
As it happens, the inventor of infinite scrolling, Aza Raskin, now claims that this wasn’t his original intention. He also believes that the effects of his brainchild are so destructive that he has gone on record to apologize for the harm it has caused, recognizing that although he originally intended to do good, his creation now wields a power almost too great and terrible to imagine.
A few generations ago, the human brain merely needed to drag itself away from whatever happened to be going on outside the window, and it could happily remain productive all day long. Towards the end of the twentieth century, it needed to battle such distractions as the lunchtime news headlines and the next episode of The Simpsons. Today, the news keeps on coming as long as your thumb keeps on flicking, and YouTube will happily serve you Simpsons re-runs all day long once its algorithm has figured out that’s what will keep you tuned in (which is to say, tuned out).
There’s simply no way your humble biology stands a chance. Your brain was designed to compete with other biological brains and with the real-world diversions in which God has placed us; it wasn’t built to battle against a multi-billion dollar supercomputer that’s constantly sifting through a near-infinite ocean of garbage to figure out what to feed you next.
So the next time you find yourself literally unable to tear your eyes away from the screen, you now know why. You’re fast becoming a voluntary extra in a real-life Brave New World, trading your time, energy, and mental capacity for a succession of dopamine shots so that Big Tech can keep pushing up its share price by selling advertising space.
It Messes With Your Brain
Having successfully got you hooked, social media causes a host of negative psychological effects, in some cases even causing physical changes in your brain’s internal wiring. There’s not space here to go into all the details of the research; I’ll just summarize some of the results.
Prolonged social media use hacks the pleasure and rewards centers of your brain by providing a long-term chronic overdose of dopamine and other feel-good hormones which keep you hooked while decreasing your interest in and enjoyment of other normal pleasures such as food, conversation, reading, sport, and sex. Its echo-chamber effect trains you in group-think, diminishing your capacity for independent critical thought and pathologically increasing your need for affirmation from others. The dominance of images on many platforms distorts our norms of physical attractiveness, with particularly damaging effects on younger women, whose worries about their own imagined imperfections lead to increased levels of anxiety, depression, and other psychological disorders. Its high reliance on emojis to express emotional responses diminishes our capacity to express more subtle and nuanced emotions in words, with obvious ill effects on our real-world relationships. Social media use increases the likelihood of obesity and related physiological problems, not only by displacing physical activities such as sport, but also by artificially stimulating users’ appetites through exposure to “food porn.” It provides an open door to destructive content such as pornography, violence, and online bullying. It dramatically reduces productivity by encouraging users to engage in what they believe (wrongly) is “multitasking,” when in fact what they’re actually doing is better described as rapid task-switching, which decreases productivity, shortens attention span, increases fatigue, reduces resistance to other distractions, and diminishes general cognitive performance. It encourages overspending by creating a context in which friends, influencers, and celebrities combine to apply concentrated pressure towards the impulsive purchase of unnecessary and ultimately unwanted luxuries. It interferes with healthy sleep patterns, both by suppressing melatonin production through the predominantly blue light emitted from screens, and also by increasing neural stimulation when your brain needs to shut down. This long-term sleep deprivation results in a horrific cascade of other long-term health problems including increased risk of heart attack, stroke, dementia, and high blood pressure, reduced immune function, and dramatically increased danger of death or injury from accidents due to chronic tiredness.
It Creates Ideological Bubbles
This is precisely why many people like social media so much, and in many scenarios there’s no obvious harm in it. Social media allows people with similar interests to form online quasi-communities even there’s no one nearby who shares their passion. There may not be many people in your town who want to discuss how to build an Ugly Drum Smoker or explore the intricacies of the Najdorf Sicilian, but you can find Facebook groups devoted to these and a near-infinite variety of other minority-report pursuits. Social media thus enables us to pursue our hobbies without endlessly boring our friends and neighbors with debates about the right moment to push the A-pawn.
Indeed, when used in this way, social media even has the potential to encourage the formation of real communities, since there’s always a chance that your new Facebook friends may live close enough to actually hang out together.
But there’s a significant downside to all this as soon as you start using social media for anything religious, political, or ideological. The algorithms that control social media feeds tend to create ideological echo-chambers by surrounding you with people who think more or less like you. This doesn’t eliminate the possibility of arguments (more on that below), in large part because people are still bizarrely capable of quarreling even when they’re in near-complete agreement. But it does dramatically limit our exposure to alternative paradigms. Thus social media platforms effectively short-circuit our critical faculties by distancing us from folks who might be able to offer radically different perspectives, allowing us to persist in the deluded notion that our most ludicrous ideas are almost mainstream.
These algorithms are really smart. They don’t simply dispense more of the same; they also feed you the right kind of different. This is why social media has provided the perfect spawning ground for every kind of conspiracy theory: the algorithms have figured out that the kind of people who think the Earth is flat are also more likely than average to believe that redheads are aliens and cancer can be cured by essential oils. There’s really only one way to cure yourself of these crackpot notions: get out more.
It Replaces People with Avatars
Social media encourages the formation of disembodied quasi-relationships at the expense of embodied interactions with actual human beings whom you can see, hear, and touch. At the extreme end of the spectrum, we’ve all encountered the caricature of the twenty-something who’s still living in his mom’s basement and rarely seem to encounter daylight, never mind other people. The caricature is disturbing precisely because in a small number of cases it’s close to the truth.
More commonly, however, the pathologies are less obvious. Interactions on social media frequently range from perfunctory and brittle to rude, spiteful, and malicious. It’s easy to see why. In normal, embodied relationships, the physical presence of others imposes a moderating influence on our behavior. We know instinctively that we’re not just battling with ideas; we’re relating to people, so we don’t generally lash out at the first sign of disagreement. We rightly value the actual human being sitting in front of us, and we recognize that the community around us expects certain standards of behavior.
But everything seems different in the world of social media. We’ve all seen online discussions about the most trivial issues erupt in a matter of moments into blazing rows, complete with personal insults and expletives that would make a sailor blush. The expletives may be absent among Christians, but the spitefulness is frequently still there. More commonly, people will go online simply to vent their frustrations, posting barbed criticisms of (normally unnamed) others rather than taking the time and trouble to sit down face-to-face to talk (and listen) to them.
It seems that the physical absence of our interlocutors and other onlookers is enough to remove some of the God-given social controls that would normally cause us to exercise godliness and restraint. We quickly forget the need to speak “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love” (Eph 4:2). Instead, “with his mouth the godless man would destroy his neighbor” (Pr 11:9).
At a more subtle level, interactions on social media tend to lack the kind of texture that ought to characterize our interactions with different kinds of people. A young man ought to talk to an older woman differently than how he addresses his peers, all of us ought to speak with an appropriate degree of respect to (and about) people in positions of authority, and so on. Their opinions might well be wrong, but as people they ought to be honored in appropriate ways. “Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father. Treat younger men like brothers, older women like mothers, younger women like sisters, in all purity” (1 Tim 5:1-2). “You who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another” (1 Pet 5:5). Such restraint is rare in the social mediaverse.
Of course, the absence of these social restraints is precisely why many people enjoy social media. It democratizes discourse, giving the most callow teenager a platform alongside the mother of half a dozen children and the Elder of thirty years’ standing. Whatever the benefits of giving a voice to everyone in our communities (and there are many), it is not obvious that social media is the best way to do it. One great benefit of embodied, personal interactions is that they entail exposure to more of the factors that make a person who they are—their age, their office, their godliness, their character, the shape of their relationships with others, their history of service to others in the community, and the esteem in which they are held as a result. Social Media does not encourage this kind of nuance.
It Distorts Our Priorities
One of the things that many people like most about social media is that it gives them a sense of proximity to the Big Issues Of The Day. Whether they are events on the world stage or intramural spats within their small corner of Christendom, people like the feeling of making a contribution to Things That Matter.
But therein lies the rub: What really matters? More pointedly, what things ought to matter to us? And how are we best equipped to make a contribution to them?
The answer is less obvious than we might think, for at least two reasons. First, people enjoy the feeling of making a contribution to the Big Issues Of The Day, when in reality the actual effect of their contributions is practically nonexistent. I’m sorry to break this to you, but the President isn’t reading your tweets. It’s not even likely that whatever theologian you’ve just set straight is paying much attention. You’re just ranting at the screen along with everyone else.
Second, it is far from clear that these Big Issues are in reality as big as they appear. At this point, social media exacerbates trends that are endemic in all forms of mass circulation media, where many remote events are portrayed as significant when in fact they have no impact at all on our lives. Indeed, as Neil Postman has argued, even the concept of “the news headlines” is in fact simply an artifact of the media available to report them. If you don’t believe me, check out the current headlines on your favorite news site. Hardly any of them describe events that will make the slightest difference to your life, and they’ll certainly not be affected by your tweets about them.
So what should occupy our attention? Many things, but almost none that are best addressed via social media. How is your son getting on with his math homework? Is your family’s next meal going to be a joyous occasion, or will it deteriorate into the hasty and hassled affair it was last time? Has anyone reached out to the family that was unexpectedly absent from church last Sunday? Does the mother of newborn twins across the street need a little help with her shopping? Does your elderly neighbor need his yard swept? These are the matters in which we’re actually able to change the small corner of the world in which the Lord has placed us. Is it possible that the most significant result of your tweeting is the indirect effect of its distraction from what you ought to be doing?
It Distracts Us From Greater Things
Just think for a moment about all the words that have been written during the last few thousand years of human history. Quite apart from the inspired authors of Scripture, consider the philosophy of Aristotle, Kant, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kierkegaard; think of the vast theological wealth of the Aquinas, Anselm, Abelard, Athanasius, and Augustine; consider Calvin, Owen, Edwards, Turretin, Bavinck, and the mountains of Puritan devotional literature; contemplate the works of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Joyce, Chekhov, Faulkner, Woolf, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Austen. What of the poetry of Herbert, Hopkins, Donne, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Chaucer, and Milton, and the haiku of Basho, Issa, Shiki, and Buson? And what of Newton, Kuhn, Penrose, Feynman, and Dyson?
As I write this, I’m most conscious not so much of the stature of those I’ve listed, but of the monumental list of greats I’m leaving out. All of this is accessible to us, and yet for some reason we’ve been conned into thinking that the words most worthy to command our attention were written 27 seconds ago by some juvenile hack hammering away on his smartphone.
Just think what you could be in five years’ time if you spent just thirty minutes a day reading something worthwhile.
And why stick simply to reading? Consider what you could do instead of cruising around on social media: learn another language, knock five minutes off your 5k time, put 100lbs on your deadlift 1-rep max, learn to play the piano, carve soapstone, take up carpentry, learn calligraphy, write to the Pastor of a persecuted church in China, the list is literally endless.
Set against all these wondrous opportunities, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that much social media is a gigantic waste of time, a culpable distraction from far more significant and beautiful things that ought to occupy our attention. We’re in grave danger of turning into the men of Athens who “would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new” (Acts 17:21), or the “weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim 3:6-7).
It Conveys Toxic Context
Social media is frequently touted as a forum for sharing ideas. That’s all well and good, you might think, until you start to consider what those ideas actually are. Regrettably, it turns out that the things that fill the average social media feed are not always tremendously edifying.
This is a problem shared by social media with the internet in general. To take the most obvious example, what’s the one category of online content that accounts for 25% of all internet searches, 30% of internet video, and 35% of all downloads? The answer, of course, is pornography. We wouldn’t let our kids browse unsupervised through a bookstore where one book in three was filled with such perversion. Why would be imagine that they’re safe online, when nobody can see what they’re doing?
Social media has played its own special part in the propagation of bad ideas. Just consider for a moment: How many young women would have been saved from anorexia and other eating disorders if their image of female beauty had not been so distorted by Instagram? Where would wokeness be without Facebook? Where would the transgender movement be without Twitter? It’s bad enough that social media has turned boys into bullies and girls into gossips. It’s now started turning boys into girls and girls into boys. Perhaps it’s time to draw the line.
It’s Instant, Global, and Permanent
For most of the last few hundred years, the permanence of most available forms of communication and the size of the audience they’re able to reach have run more or less in proportion to the time taken to produce them. Anyone could make a careless insult in passing, but except in rare circumstances it would only be heard by a few people, and careless words could be retracted before they reached too many ears. By contrast, widespread and permanent publication generally involved a lengthy process of review. Even articles written for daily newspapers and weekly magazines would go through multiple revisions under many pairs of eyes before hitting the press. In short, you could speak hastily, or you could speak indelibly to a large audience, but not both.
It’s easy to see the benefits of these providential safeguards. We’re all capable of foolish words, and the delay built into the more permanent and widely circulated forms of media allows time for considered reflection, rewriting, and even withdrawal ahead of publication.
But just imagine for a moment what the world would be like if all the foolish, ill-considered, rash, graceless, and downright ignorant things that people are capable of thinking could instantly and permanently be published to a global audience. Pretty disastrous, don’t you think?
Yet this is the world into which we have been catapulted by the internet in general, and by social media in particular. Social media combines the immediacy of speech and the permanence of writing, with potentially ruinous consequences.
Gone are all the inbuilt safeguards that previously held in check our graceless and hasty words, our ignorant and obnoxious opinions. One wonders how the world might look if everything posted online were subject to an automatic 24-hour delay, giving us time to think about the potential consequences of our words. But that’s not a feature that would likely be met with widespread enthusiasm, for “a fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion” (Pr 18:2).
A Brief Word In Defense Of Some Notable Exceptions
If the above criticisms are even partly true, it looks like many forms of social media are not appropriate for discussing anything requiring serious thought or nuanced articulation, and they may have a whole range of additional problems. But this does not mean that all online platforms are beyond redemption. Indeed, some social media platforms seem to have improved our ability to communicate well and think straight—they certainly do a better job that traditional media.
Mainstream TV and radio producers routinely urge contributors on even the most highbrow discussion programs to restrict each comment to just two or three sentences. Anyone who attempts to speak for longer risks being interrupted, often by the presenter. Flagship current affairs programs condense their entire coverage of complex issues to just a couple of minutes before moving on to the next subject. All this has carried on for decades under the unexamined assumption that viewers and listeners are incapable of following a logical argument for more than a couple of mouthfuls of breakfast cereal, and lose interest in the time it takes to brew their morning coffee.
But these assumptions, it turns out, are entirely false. People are perfectly capable of following nuanced discussions and demanding monologues about complex issues for hours on end, and in recent years some forms of social media have drawn attention to this fact.
Audio podcasts lead the way here, perhaps because the complete absence of visuals is enough to keep away the trolls and encourage more serious engagement. I’m currently listening to an online reading of, and commentary on, Herbert Marcuse’s epoch-making and ideologically ruinous 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance.” No interruptions, no distractions, no gimmicks; just a really smart guy with a microphone reading an essay out loud and talking about it for several hours. Outstanding.
I wonder what makes such resources different. Perhaps their extended audio character makes it harder to snip a sentence or two out of context, instead forcing listeners to engage more seriously. Or perhaps they tend to impose extended engagement with other human beings, whose personhood is inescapably present in their spoken words in a way that can all too easily be ignored when their words are written down. To the extent that they place us in company with another person, these longer forms of spoken discourse seem remarkably productive.
These aren’t the only fruitful forms of online engagement. Private email and social media groups often (though not always) seem able to remain reasonably civil and productive, especially when they serve communities that also meet in person. Subscription-based services such as Substack also seem to fare reasonably well. And occasionally one finds a website that offers genuinely stimulating content without providing a platform for the kind of toxic comments that pollute most social media interaction. Perhaps these platforms make it harder to forget that we’re dealing with real human beings, or perhaps we all just tend to behave better when we’re conscious that we’ll suffer meaningful consequences (either virtually or in real life) for behaving badly.
True, none of these platforms are perfect. They still leave open the possibility of addiction, ideological bubbles, distorted priorities, timewasting, and so on. But if they’re not guaranteed to work, at least they’re not guaranteed to fail.
Endnote: Yes, I know there aren’t actually ten reasons, but only eight. That was deliberate, and this explanatory note was included simply so that when I receive the inevitable denunciations I can check whether the critics actually read to the end. Whether or not you like what you’ve read, thank you for taking the time to do so.
Steve Jeffery is a pastor at All Saints Presbyterian Church in Forth Worth, TX.
Introduction
On June 20th, 2018, I decided that I would no longer use Facebook for any kind of religious, political, or ideological discussion. I’d had misgivings for a while, but this was the critical moment, indelibly enshrined in the timestamp of a rather disappointing Facebook comment that finally pushed me over the edge.
The comment itself was very short—just a single sentence—and was written by one of the most intelligent, thoughtful, articulate, and productive young scholars I’ve ever had the honor to meet. But in those few words, he reduced himself to a sarcastic, ignorant, uncharitable, contentious attention-seeker. To this day, I remain grateful for his comment, not because of its content (obviously), but because of the clarity with which it highlighted the capacity of at least that particular social media platform (and, it turns out, many others) to generate misunderstanding, discourage careful thought, undermine or displace genuine friendships, encourage hasty knee-jerk reactions to complex issues that in fact require a great deal of careful consideration, and create in the minds of countless well-intentioned but naive people the misconceived notion that they are changing the world when they are merely howling at the moon.
For these and other reasons (which I summarize below), I believe that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and (most of) the rest of the social mediaverse are more trouble than they’re worth, and certainly should not be trusted with anything important. And since religion, politics, and ideology certainly fall into this category, social media platforms ought not to be trusted with any of them.
The irony of the present situation is of course pretty clear, since anything published on the Theopolis blog will likely be shared on social media within minutes. In a paradoxical twist, then, one implication of my argument is that the following paragraphs should never have been written. In my defense, I tried to resist, but the flesh is weak, and Dr Leithart twisted my arm.
So perhaps you’d be kind enough to regard this article as a kind of critique by parody. If you’re reading this when you’ve already been surfing the web for a couple of hours, or when you really ought to be doing something more productive, or at 11:35pm when you ought to be asleep, then you’re living proof that I might just have a point. Above all, if you’re tempted to post a comment right away, barely half a dozen paragraphs in, then I’m not at all sorry that I’ve broken my resolution, because you’re right in the bullseye of the target audience.
But if we’re going to write a parody, we’d better go all in. So here, in a personal anti-tribute to click-bait hacks everywhere, are my Ten Reasons That You’ll Never Believe Why Social Media Is Terrible For Any Kind of Serious Discussion and Pretty Bad In Lots Of Other Ways, Along With A Brief Word In Defense Of Some Notable Exceptions.
It’s Deliberately Addictive
In recent years, social media developers have honed to near-perfection a multitude of features designed to keep you hooked on their product. Features such as infinite scrolling, autoplay video, and those little flashing dots that indicate someone is typing a reply are now deployed with the specific intention of hacking the neural pathways in your brain that give you a sense of accomplishment, reward, and pleasure. Above all, on the other side of that benign-looking six-inch screen lurks a malevolent mountain of supercomputing power designed to feed you exactly what’s needed to keep you online for just a few moments more. That’s why you’re hooked, and it’s probably why you’re reading this right now.
As it happens, the inventor of infinite scrolling, Aza Raskin, now claims that this wasn’t his original intention. He also believes that the effects of his brainchild are so destructive that he has gone on record to apologize for the harm it has caused, recognizing that although he originally intended to do good, his creation now wields a power almost too great and terrible to imagine.
A few generations ago, the human brain merely needed to drag itself away from whatever happened to be going on outside the window, and it could happily remain productive all day long. Towards the end of the twentieth century, it needed to battle such distractions as the lunchtime news headlines and the next episode of The Simpsons. Today, the news keeps on coming as long as your thumb keeps on flicking, and YouTube will happily serve you Simpsons re-runs all day long once its algorithm has figured out that’s what will keep you tuned in (which is to say, tuned out).
There’s simply no way your humble biology stands a chance. Your brain was designed to compete with other biological brains and with the real-world diversions in which God has placed us; it wasn’t built to battle against a multi-billion dollar supercomputer that’s constantly sifting through a near-infinite ocean of garbage to figure out what to feed you next.
So the next time you find yourself literally unable to tear your eyes away from the screen, you now know why. You’re fast becoming a voluntary extra in a real-life Brave New World, trading your time, energy, and mental capacity for a succession of dopamine shots so that Big Tech can keep pushing up its share price by selling advertising space.
It Messes With Your Brain
Having successfully got you hooked, social media causes a host of negative psychological effects, in some cases even causing physical changes in your brain’s internal wiring. There’s not space here to go into all the details of the research; I’ll just summarize some of the results.
Prolonged social media use hacks the pleasure and rewards centers of your brain by providing a long-term chronic overdose of dopamine and other feel-good hormones which keep you hooked while decreasing your interest in and enjoyment of other normal pleasures such as food, conversation, reading, sport, and sex. Its echo-chamber effect trains you in group-think, diminishing your capacity for independent critical thought and pathologically increasing your need for affirmation from others. The dominance of images on many platforms distorts our norms of physical attractiveness, with particularly damaging effects on younger women, whose worries about their own imagined imperfections lead to increased levels of anxiety, depression, and other psychological disorders. Its high reliance on emojis to express emotional responses diminishes our capacity to express more subtle and nuanced emotions in words, with obvious ill effects on our real-world relationships. Social media use increases the likelihood of obesity and related physiological problems, not only by displacing physical activities such as sport, but also by artificially stimulating users’ appetites through exposure to “food porn.” It provides an open door to destructive content such as pornography, violence, and online bullying. It dramatically reduces productivity by encouraging users to engage in what they believe (wrongly) is “multitasking,” when in fact what they’re actually doing is better described as rapid task-switching, which decreases productivity, shortens attention span, increases fatigue, reduces resistance to other distractions, and diminishes general cognitive performance. It encourages overspending by creating a context in which friends, influencers, and celebrities combine to apply concentrated pressure towards the impulsive purchase of unnecessary and ultimately unwanted luxuries. It interferes with healthy sleep patterns, both by suppressing melatonin production through the predominantly blue light emitted from screens, and also by increasing neural stimulation when your brain needs to shut down. This long-term sleep deprivation results in a horrific cascade of other long-term health problems including increased risk of heart attack, stroke, dementia, and high blood pressure, reduced immune function, and dramatically increased danger of death or injury from accidents due to chronic tiredness.
It Creates Ideological Bubbles
This is precisely why many people like social media so much, and in many scenarios there’s no obvious harm in it. Social media allows people with similar interests to form online quasi-communities even there’s no one nearby who shares their passion. There may not be many people in your town who want to discuss how to build an Ugly Drum Smoker or explore the intricacies of the Najdorf Sicilian, but you can find Facebook groups devoted to these and a near-infinite variety of other minority-report pursuits. Social media thus enables us to pursue our hobbies without endlessly boring our friends and neighbors with debates about the right moment to push the A-pawn.
Indeed, when used in this way, social media even has the potential to encourage the formation of real communities, since there’s always a chance that your new Facebook friends may live close enough to actually hang out together.
But there’s a significant downside to all this as soon as you start using social media for anything religious, political, or ideological. The algorithms that control social media feeds tend to create ideological echo-chambers by surrounding you with people who think more or less like you. This doesn’t eliminate the possibility of arguments (more on that below), in large part because people are still bizarrely capable of quarreling even when they’re in near-complete agreement. But it does dramatically limit our exposure to alternative paradigms. Thus social media platforms effectively short-circuit our critical faculties by distancing us from folks who might be able to offer radically different perspectives, allowing us to persist in the deluded notion that our most ludicrous ideas are almost mainstream.
These algorithms are really smart. They don’t simply dispense more of the same; they also feed you the right kind of different. This is why social media has provided the perfect spawning ground for every kind of conspiracy theory: the algorithms have figured out that the kind of people who think the Earth is flat are also more likely than average to believe that redheads are aliens and cancer can be cured by essential oils. There’s really only one way to cure yourself of these crackpot notions: get out more.
It Replaces People with Avatars
Social media encourages the formation of disembodied quasi-relationships at the expense of embodied interactions with actual human beings whom you can see, hear, and touch. At the extreme end of the spectrum, we’ve all encountered the caricature of the twenty-something who’s still living in his mom’s basement and rarely seem to encounter daylight, never mind other people. The caricature is disturbing precisely because in a small number of cases it’s close to the truth.
More commonly, however, the pathologies are less obvious. Interactions on social media frequently range from perfunctory and brittle to rude, spiteful, and malicious. It’s easy to see why. In normal, embodied relationships, the physical presence of others imposes a moderating influence on our behavior. We know instinctively that we’re not just battling with ideas; we’re relating to people, so we don’t generally lash out at the first sign of disagreement. We rightly value the actual human being sitting in front of us, and we recognize that the community around us expects certain standards of behavior.
But everything seems different in the world of social media. We’ve all seen online discussions about the most trivial issues erupt in a matter of moments into blazing rows, complete with personal insults and expletives that would make a sailor blush. The expletives may be absent among Christians, but the spitefulness is frequently still there. More commonly, people will go online simply to vent their frustrations, posting barbed criticisms of (normally unnamed) others rather than taking the time and trouble to sit down face-to-face to talk (and listen) to them.
It seems that the physical absence of our interlocutors and other onlookers is enough to remove some of the God-given social controls that would normally cause us to exercise godliness and restraint. We quickly forget the need to speak “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love” (Eph 4:2). Instead, “with his mouth the godless man would destroy his neighbor” (Pr 11:9).
At a more subtle level, interactions on social media tend to lack the kind of texture that ought to characterize our interactions with different kinds of people. A young man ought to talk to an older woman differently than how he addresses his peers, all of us ought to speak with an appropriate degree of respect to (and about) people in positions of authority, and so on. Their opinions might well be wrong, but as people they ought to be honored in appropriate ways. “Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father. Treat younger men like brothers, older women like mothers, younger women like sisters, in all purity” (1 Tim 5:1-2). “You who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another” (1 Pet 5:5). Such restraint is rare in the social mediaverse.
Of course, the absence of these social restraints is precisely why many people enjoy social media. It democratizes discourse, giving the most callow teenager a platform alongside the mother of half a dozen children and the Elder of thirty years’ standing. Whatever the benefits of giving a voice to everyone in our communities (and there are many), it is not obvious that social media is the best way to do it. One great benefit of embodied, personal interactions is that they entail exposure to more of the factors that make a person who they are—their age, their office, their godliness, their character, the shape of their relationships with others, their history of service to others in the community, and the esteem in which they are held as a result. Social Media does not encourage this kind of nuance.
It Distorts Our Priorities
One of the things that many people like most about social media is that it gives them a sense of proximity to the Big Issues Of The Day. Whether they are events on the world stage or intramural spats within their small corner of Christendom, people like the feeling of making a contribution to Things That Matter.
But therein lies the rub: What really matters? More pointedly, what things ought to matter to us? And how are we best equipped to make a contribution to them?
The answer is less obvious than we might think, for at least two reasons. First, people enjoy the feeling of making a contribution to the Big Issues Of The Day, when in reality the actual effect of their contributions is practically nonexistent. I’m sorry to break this to you, but the President isn’t reading your tweets. It’s not even likely that whatever theologian you’ve just set straight is paying much attention. You’re just ranting at the screen along with everyone else.
Second, it is far from clear that these Big Issues are in reality as big as they appear. At this point, social media exacerbates trends that are endemic in all forms of mass circulation media, where many remote events are portrayed as significant when in fact they have no impact at all on our lives. Indeed, as Neil Postman has argued, even the concept of “the news headlines” is in fact simply an artifact of the media available to report them. If you don’t believe me, check out the current headlines on your favorite news site. Hardly any of them describe events that will make the slightest difference to your life, and they’ll certainly not be affected by your tweets about them.
So what should occupy our attention? Many things, but almost none that are best addressed via social media. How is your son getting on with his math homework? Is your family’s next meal going to be a joyous occasion, or will it deteriorate into the hasty and hassled affair it was last time? Has anyone reached out to the family that was unexpectedly absent from church last Sunday? Does the mother of newborn twins across the street need a little help with her shopping? Does your elderly neighbor need his yard swept? These are the matters in which we’re actually able to change the small corner of the world in which the Lord has placed us. Is it possible that the most significant result of your tweeting is the indirect effect of its distraction from what you ought to be doing?
It Distracts Us From Greater Things
Just think for a moment about all the words that have been written during the last few thousand years of human history. Quite apart from the inspired authors of Scripture, consider the philosophy of Aristotle, Kant, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kierkegaard; think of the vast theological wealth of the Aquinas, Anselm, Abelard, Athanasius, and Augustine; consider Calvin, Owen, Edwards, Turretin, Bavinck, and the mountains of Puritan devotional literature; contemplate the works of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Joyce, Chekhov, Faulkner, Woolf, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Austen. What of the poetry of Herbert, Hopkins, Donne, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Chaucer, and Milton, and the haiku of Basho, Issa, Shiki, and Buson? And what of Newton, Kuhn, Penrose, Feynman, and Dyson?
As I write this, I’m most conscious not so much of the stature of those I’ve listed, but of the monumental list of greats I’m leaving out. All of this is accessible to us, and yet for some reason we’ve been conned into thinking that the words most worthy to command our attention were written 27 seconds ago by some juvenile hack hammering away on his smartphone.
Just think what you could be in five years’ time if you spent just thirty minutes a day reading something worthwhile.
And why stick simply to reading? Consider what you could do instead of cruising around on social media: learn another language, knock five minutes off your 5k time, put 100lbs on your deadlift 1-rep max, learn to play the piano, carve soapstone, take up carpentry, learn calligraphy, write to the Pastor of a persecuted church in China, the list is literally endless.
Set against all these wondrous opportunities, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that much social media is a gigantic waste of time, a culpable distraction from far more significant and beautiful things that ought to occupy our attention. We’re in grave danger of turning into the men of Athens who “would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new” (Acts 17:21), or the “weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim 3:6-7).
It Conveys Toxic Context
Social media is frequently touted as a forum for sharing ideas. That’s all well and good, you might think, until you start to consider what those ideas actually are. Regrettably, it turns out that the things that fill the average social media feed are not always tremendously edifying.
This is a problem shared by social media with the internet in general. To take the most obvious example, what’s the one category of online content that accounts for 25% of all internet searches, 30% of internet video, and 35% of all downloads? The answer, of course, is pornography. We wouldn’t let our kids browse unsupervised through a bookstore where one book in three was filled with such perversion. Why would be imagine that they’re safe online, when nobody can see what they’re doing?
Social media has played its own special part in the propagation of bad ideas. Just consider for a moment: How many young women would have been saved from anorexia and other eating disorders if their image of female beauty had not been so distorted by Instagram? Where would wokeness be without Facebook? Where would the transgender movement be without Twitter? It’s bad enough that social media has turned boys into bullies and girls into gossips. It’s now started turning boys into girls and girls into boys. Perhaps it’s time to draw the line.
It’s Instant, Global, and Permanent
For most of the last few hundred years, the permanence of most available forms of communication and the size of the audience they’re able to reach have run more or less in proportion to the time taken to produce them. Anyone could make a careless insult in passing, but except in rare circumstances it would only be heard by a few people, and careless words could be retracted before they reached too many ears. By contrast, widespread and permanent publication generally involved a lengthy process of review. Even articles written for daily newspapers and weekly magazines would go through multiple revisions under many pairs of eyes before hitting the press. In short, you could speak hastily, or you could speak indelibly to a large audience, but not both.
It’s easy to see the benefits of these providential safeguards. We’re all capable of foolish words, and the delay built into the more permanent and widely circulated forms of media allows time for considered reflection, rewriting, and even withdrawal ahead of publication.
But just imagine for a moment what the world would be like if all the foolish, ill-considered, rash, graceless, and downright ignorant things that people are capable of thinking could instantly and permanently be published to a global audience. Pretty disastrous, don’t you think?
Yet this is the world into which we have been catapulted by the internet in general, and by social media in particular. Social media combines the immediacy of speech and the permanence of writing, with potentially ruinous consequences.
Gone are all the inbuilt safeguards that previously held in check our graceless and hasty words, our ignorant and obnoxious opinions. One wonders how the world might look if everything posted online were subject to an automatic 24-hour delay, giving us time to think about the potential consequences of our words. But that’s not a feature that would likely be met with widespread enthusiasm, for “a fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion” (Pr 18:2).
A Brief Word In Defense Of Some Notable Exceptions
If the above criticisms are even partly true, it looks like many forms of social media are not appropriate for discussing anything requiring serious thought or nuanced articulation, and they may have a whole range of additional problems. But this does not mean that all online platforms are beyond redemption. Indeed, some social media platforms seem to have improved our ability to communicate well and think straight—they certainly do a better job that traditional media.
Mainstream TV and radio producers routinely urge contributors on even the most highbrow discussion programs to restrict each comment to just two or three sentences. Anyone who attempts to speak for longer risks being interrupted, often by the presenter. Flagship current affairs programs condense their entire coverage of complex issues to just a couple of minutes before moving on to the next subject. All this has carried on for decades under the unexamined assumption that viewers and listeners are incapable of following a logical argument for more than a couple of mouthfuls of breakfast cereal, and lose interest in the time it takes to brew their morning coffee.
But these assumptions, it turns out, are entirely false. People are perfectly capable of following nuanced discussions and demanding monologues about complex issues for hours on end, and in recent years some forms of social media have drawn attention to this fact.
Audio podcasts lead the way here, perhaps because the complete absence of visuals is enough to keep away the trolls and encourage more serious engagement. I’m currently listening to an online reading of, and commentary on, Herbert Marcuse’s epoch-making and ideologically ruinous 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance.” No interruptions, no distractions, no gimmicks; just a really smart guy with a microphone reading an essay out loud and talking about it for several hours. Outstanding.
I wonder what makes such resources different. Perhaps their extended audio character makes it harder to snip a sentence or two out of context, instead forcing listeners to engage more seriously. Or perhaps they tend to impose extended engagement with other human beings, whose personhood is inescapably present in their spoken words in a way that can all too easily be ignored when their words are written down. To the extent that they place us in company with another person, these longer forms of spoken discourse seem remarkably productive.
These aren’t the only fruitful forms of online engagement. Private email and social media groups often (though not always) seem able to remain reasonably civil and productive, especially when they serve communities that also meet in person. Subscription-based services such as Substack also seem to fare reasonably well. And occasionally one finds a website that offers genuinely stimulating content without providing a platform for the kind of toxic comments that pollute most social media interaction. Perhaps these platforms make it harder to forget that we’re dealing with real human beings, or perhaps we all just tend to behave better when we’re conscious that we’ll suffer meaningful consequences (either virtually or in real life) for behaving badly.
True, none of these platforms are perfect. They still leave open the possibility of addiction, ideological bubbles, distorted priorities, timewasting, and so on. But if they’re not guaranteed to work, at least they’re not guaranteed to fail.
Endnote: Yes, I know there aren’t actually ten reasons, but only eight. That was deliberate, and this explanatory note was included simply so that when I receive the inevitable denunciations I can check whether the critics actually read to the end. Whether or not you like what you’ve read, thank you for taking the time to do so.
Steve Jeffery is a pastor at All Saints Presbyterian Church in Forth Worth, TX.
-->