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On My Constant Battle with Social Media

As I am finally getting around to reading Jonathan Haidt’s much-praised The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, I am once again thinking through my own relationship to technology as a whole, and to social media in particular. My feelings on such technologies have always been a bit mixed, as on the one hand I have met some of my closest friends through social media platforms, but on the other, I have had some rather terrible experiences by means of these platforms. I also recognize that their use often leads to increased anxiety, and a decreased possibility of having a coherent and rational discussion. In this article, I lay out some of my thoughts on these platforms, and express why I think we need to pursue a better way forward.

Why I Began in the First Place

Like all good millennials, I began my relationship with social media on MySpace during my later years in high school. I posted what limited pictures were allowed on the platform of myself with died black hair that I had straightened covering half of my face, tight jeans, and usually a children’s XL band t-shirt of some kind.

This was from a photoshoot of my short-lived band called Never August. I was the vocalist, which consisted of far more screaming than singing. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), we never recorded anything.

Like many at that time, I really only had two reasons to use the platform:

1. To find new bands to listen to, and

2. To get attention from cute girls.

Both of these things worked pretty well at the time, I suppose, though I can’t say that the latter thing was the most virtuous use of the platform (to be clear, no salacious pictures here. These were Christian punk and scene girls I was talking to). After MySpace stopped being a useful platform for music, and my impeccable alt-style and music taste helped me find my now-wife, there was no longer any reason to use the platform at all. Thus ended my relationship to social media.

Or not.

I pushed hard against using facebook for a long time. I was annoyed about the fact that everyone kept talking about “friending” and “poking” people in college, when we could simply talk to people in person. I didn’t get the point. As a bit of a curmudgeon, and as one who hates to do things just because everyone else is doing it, I held off for a long time, until I inevitably gave in after enough pestering from my friends. Though I initially didn’t understand its popularity, facebook became useful when I began to join some theological groups, and realized that there was some benefit here in having an opportunity to write and debate with similarly theologically interested people.

Of these new online platforms and forms of communication that grew during the 2000s, the one that I was most drawn to was blogging. During college I wrestled with a number of theological issues which eventually led to my leaving the Reformed tradition for the Lutheran. My BlogSpot page (titled Just & Sinner) became an outlet to process these ideas through writing. I never had any thought that these posts would actually be read by anyone outside of my immediate circle of friends, but after only a few months of writing, it became apparent that I was wrong. During my undergraduate studies, I thought that I was going to pursue a graduate degree in New Testament studies with a focus on Pauline soteriology. In preparation for that, I began an independent study on the New Perspective on Paul (which was all the rage at the time), and wrote up some reviews of the books and thoughts of N.T. Wright, James Dunn, and E.P. Sanders for my blog. One day, after posting a few of these, I noticed that I had received a new comment from a scholar who worked in the field. And then, about a week later, I had received one from another. I never had any thought that anyone other than my own roommates would be paying attention to what a 21 year old college student was writing online. But, contrary to these expectations, the audience began to steadily grow.

Totally unintentionally, I had built an audience through an online platform. I began to realize, after my move to the Lutheran church, that there were not an awful lot of resources online for Lutheran theology—especially ones aimed at those who were not themselves from that background. Thus, I came to see some benefit in using the platform as a means to bring Lutheran theological resources into public view, since the New Calvinists had dominated these spheres of new online media.

While I pursued my Masters in Theology, I continued to use this blog as a way to process my thoughts about various doctrinal topics, and was asked to be a guest on a few different podcasts. It was also at this time when I had my first articles accepted for publication in theological journals. There was some growing visibility for my name, which I had initially hoped would lead to a faculty position somewhere. After God moved me into the direction of pastoral ministry, and I was called to my first parish, I initially planned on spending my non-ministry time in doctoral work. I had been accepted into a PhD program at the London School of Theology, and was planning to continue my studies of the doctrine of justification in Paul and the Patristics. However, I had also just had my first child, moved my family across the country, and began to serve in full time ministry. After listening to some much-needed wisdom from my wife (who would have supported whatever I chose to do), I realized that adding a doctoral program to all that was new in my life may be a bit too much.

This is when I decided to delay my pursued of a PhD, to spend some time writing (out of this came my first three books: The Righteousness of One, Christification, and The Great Divide), and I started a podcast. As I observed people moving away from written blogs toward podcasting, I thought that this might be another opportunity to bring a Lutheran theological voice into an area that was dominated by Calvinists. This would give me the opportunity to continue to pursue the intellectual life, while doing so in a way that did not have the same kind of pressure that a degree program would. Thus began the Just & Sinner podcast.

Eventually, It Got Weird

As the podcast grew, so did the interview appearances on other podcasts. In order to interact with others who were interested in the Lutheran church, I began to look for platforms to do so other than facebook and blog comments (which were becoming far less active). I had a few videos on my YouTube channel, which had initially been created as a place to post Yo-Yoing videos, but that wasn’t a focus yet. After recommendations to do so from a number of other people, I decided to create a Twitter account. Out of this grew a small “community” (I don’t think such a thing exists on the internet, but that’s another discussion) of Lutherans who talked about theology, apologetics, and liturgy. I made some great friends through those initial couple years (though it also led to some of my most traumatic life experiences), so I can’t say that the platform is entirely negative.

In my initial online experiences, whether blogging, discussing things on facebook, or tweeting, these online forums were not ever-present realities that obscured my face-to-face interactions with the people around me. I refused the smartphone for years, because I didn’t want to develop an unhealthy relationship to technology, and I knew that such a thing was inevitable if I did purchase one. Those early online interactions discussed so far were had on a computer while I was sitting at my desk. And, when I was away from my computer, I didn’t think about them all that much. The one piece of technology that stayed with me throughout the day was my kindle. But having Bruce McCormack’s books on Karl Barth at my fingertips was not quite the temptation for instant gratification that can be found on the smartphone.

In 2015, with much resistance, I finally gave in to the smartphone. When I became more focused on ministry to college students, I realized that connectivity to those students on platforms like Instagram was going to be a helpful tool to connect with them. Thus began the slow decline into the smartphone fueled existence that we have nearly all faced since that time. There are a lot of things that changed with this move. One is that when the smartphone became dominant, it became a sudden expectation that everyone is reachable at all times for any reason. Any divide between work and life simply disappeared as there was now an expectation of immediate communication constantly. No one ever really gets out of work mode into one of relaxation, as there is an ever-present stress of one’s duties to respond no matter the hour. Another is that social media began to encapsulate one’s socialization throughout the day, meaning that it structures how one thinks about their life from moment to moment. It extracts us from our present existence in actual time and space, and places us into this ethereal realm of pseudo relationality.

Where It Is Today

In the last ten years, things have increasingly gotten worse. The forums that used to be means of theological discussion were overtaken by arguments about politics. And not the interesting things of politics, such as the pre-political philosophical and theological ideas that undergird public life, the relevance of classical Christian texts like Augustine’s The City of God for the modern day, or the anthropological conception of rights in its post-Lockean framework in conversation with pre-modern Christian view of the individual and his relationship to the state. Instead, it has become accusations that a cabal of powerful Jews is controlling the weather, complaining that there are too many people of Indian descent in the US, or pretending that Adolf Hitler was anything less than a demon under the guise of a human being.

There is a process of dehumanization which has progressed through forums like Twitter (X), reddit, and others. When we are divorced from actual communities in which we know one another, and in which we actually know people as people, rather than ideas or slogans, we gradually begin to see the “opposition” to our side as less like a fellow human being, and more like a set of ideas that we oppose. I am convinced that the amount of time that we have spent in these forums has distorted all of us, so that we have essentially reprogrammed the way in which we think about people, as they are viewed in the same way that we view other information (and people are presences, not information). For this reason, we can simply discard them, or treat them like an idea or object.

In short, I have come to the conclusion that interacting with people on the internet through public forums is deeply unchristian, because it is deeply unhuman (I am not speaking about private one-on-one chats or group chats with friends, which work rather differently). This is not just an issue of one mode of interaction, such that this could simply be resolved if we regulated things more, or if we spent a little less time on these platforms. The problem is the platform. When the way in which we most-commonly encounter others is not within the presence of individuals, but as elements of an algorithm to scroll past or like/dislike, we will always and inevitably begin to categorize them as mere bits of information, rather than persons. I don’t think there is any way around this problem. It has just taken us a while to see these effects, and now that we do, we have to make a choice.

My Dilemma

So what does this mean for me? I am left in a bit of a precarious spot at the moment. I am convinced that platforms like this, YouTube, and podcasts are valuable in the way that books, articles, or movies can be valuable. They allow for the creation of content that can be extensive, thoughtful, and engaging. Most of social media, however, is not like that. It is for that reason that I am committed to leaving Twitter. But, this is not quite so easy when my income comes through donations to a theological education organization that gives away and sells materials online.

To be clear, I have no issue with the use of the internet in the ways that we use it as an organization, which essentially boils down to one thing: delivering information. That is precisely what the internet is good for. Further, I am convinced that there is a deeper kind of knowing and recognition that is possible through Zoom and similar programs (though still not identical with a face-to-face meeting), that differs heavily from an algorithmically determined platform like Twitter or TikTok. This is because the former necessitates some actual attention being paid to the individuals involved in the activity. The latter see people and ideas as things to be scrolled past and swiped away by the very nature of the platform.

The problem is that organizations like ours need growth in order to survive, and that growth comes to some significant degree from social media marketing. And thus, I am stuck on Twitter for the time being. For the last year, I have had the goal in view that Just & Sinner would become financially stable enough that I would be able to leave social media behind, and spend my time on my writing and speaking. While we are not quite there yet, we’re getting closer. And part of that plan is my starting this Substack. Thus, if you would like to follow what I am thinking and doing in the future, I urge you to subscribe here, as (hopefully) soon, this will be the one place where you will be able to find my writing on current discussions and events, and I can leave the hellscape that is social media.