Crucified Hearts

I just posted the following to Facebook. In what may be a vain hope for a wider audience I share it here too. I have not given up the hope that even in the digital age words still matter.

Remember Lot’s Wife

Social media is seductive, giving the illusion of familiarity, when in fact, it is impossible to know a person truly simply through social media. We only present bits and pieces of ourselves here and when we do that we favor presenting the very best of those tidbits, even when confessing weaknesses or troubles.

We troll the pages for likes, not for rejection. The content does not matter in this respect. We share in the hope of acceptability, of confirming our bias, our prejudgments.

With the agreement and support of our selected friends, our sense of powerlessness and chaotic world is soothed. We feel less lonely, less adrift, and yet we really don’t know one another with any depth that would challenge this illusion.

Social media groups us together with its algorithm so that we assume a unanimity of thought, a feeling of being accepted even when we express the most aberrant parts of our humanity.

If you do not understand that social media is an artificial construction designed to make profit off of its products…we are the product…then you are very misinformed or quite naive.

The two areas of life where social media is most effective in maintaining its illusion is in politics and religion. It facilitates us as we seek to distance ourselves from those who disagree and unite ourselves with those of similar beliefs. This is my design.

The longer one is on social media the fewer and fewer disagreeable associations one has. We are exposed to fewer and fewer individuals or groups that would confront our bias and challenge our prejudice.

Social media algorithms are not designed to promote truth or facilitate the seeker for truth. Instead, they homogenize us into a willing mediocrity that masquerades as camaraderie and goodwill.

The longer you spend on social media the less able and the less likely you are to form and keep deep, meaningful, loving face to relationships, because there are no helpful algorithms to protect you from conflict with life in the flesh.

I am not saying there are no benefits to technology, to connecting through technology. I am saying that if you are serious about your relationships then use that technology that will enhance those relationships over time and space. Concentrate on phone calls, real-time texting, face to face video, and email.

The medium is the message. The media you use shapes the relationships you have. The tools you use to communicate shape the content of that communication, the very nature of it.

Nor should you confuse the communication between friends with the consumption of bite size pieces of information that can never give you the complete picture of either your friend, your group, or yourself.

The digital age is an age of fragmentation, of deconstruction. It takes us apart and remakes us in its own image. It is an age in which technology promises salvation, but more than this, it promises to make us god’s, autonomous arbitrators of our own destiny. With the new dominance of AI, artificial intelligence, the meta dream will  replace reality. It’s “a brave new world”, not 1984. Even now the somnolence is so deep, the dream so pleasant that very few will come out of the darkness and into the light. Those who do, it will be by a miracle of grace in which we are sought out, taken by the hand, and like Lot, lead quickly out of the city soon to be destroyed. The remainder will be like Lot’s wife, turned to a pillar of salt, sharing the judgment of God on the land she was loathed to leave. (Genesis 19.26)

So back to reality. Only a very small number, if perhaps a handful, will ever read this. And of those who do, even fewer will be benefited by it.

So why am I sharing it on social media?

That’s a very good question. I know the answer. Do you?