Crucified Hearts

I start at an innocuous place and proceed into the abyss from there. This is not channel promotion but internet critique.

My YouTube channel, Voices in the Garden, has gone over 3,000 lifetime viewing hours (in 4 years). I currently have 1,780 subscribers.

Those are very minuscule numbers in the YouTube digiverse, but they exceed my expectations.

If I followed the rules for social media marketing my numbers would be much greater. But I happen to hold the philosophy that less is more, especially when it comes to the way social media shortens the attention span of every living thing.

I’m still not convinced of its benefits and I’m concerned that it is often a little more than adventures in vanity.

It is the nature of the addict to deny our own powerlessness over distractions that numb the pain of the reality we are so desperate to escape. The addict, by virtue of their disease, persistently insists, with fanatical zeal, that they control the very thing that is consuming their life.

Social media is, by design, addicting and trivializing. It is created and marketed to feed addictive viewing habits for one simple reason: that’s how money is made in the digital world. It creates a shorter and shorter attention span, less and less rationality, so that the finger will click and click and click to the next view.

In the social media world content is nothing more than bait.

I can hear several screaming in their brain that it’s still a benefit if “used wisely”. That is addictive thinking. That’s the same voice incessantly whispering in a heroin addict’s mind.

The dictum most hated by social media is the truth told by the late media critic, Marshall McLuhan:

The medium IS the message.

The media we use, from smoke signals on a mountain top, to a pencil and paper, a keyboard, to a microphone, to a screen, to a digitized text, or video bite shape the nature and content of the communication. The message is fashioned by the tool that creates it.

There has never been a time in the history of the world when the mediums of communication were more shallow, less rational, less dehumanizing, yet more addicting in the ability to entertain the mind that craves numbness against the chaos and ever growing uncertainty of life.

From the fall of Adam we have been digressing in stature, in spirit, and in mind. We have arrived at a place where we can no longer stand upright without a digitized exoskeleton to support our flabby thoughts.

The Babylonian spirit is ensconced in a digital technopoly that counterfeits the work of the Spirit, creating a stream of consciousness that flows into the chaotic abyss well maintaining the illusion of floating on an ocean of light.

But I digress. My YouTube channel is getting a lot of views.

Maybe this book will help.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003R7L90I?ref_=cm_sw_r_ffobk_mwn_dp_P9RJ7JVGBQ82HZMFYKH3&peakEvent=5&dealEvent=0&language=en-US&bestFormat=true