I Was (Part of) What's Wrong With Social Media: I Apologize!

Facebook was my gateway drug into the world of social media. I remember the day I opened my account. It was November 16, 2011: I had just gotten home from doing close to ten years in the Virginia Department of Corrections. I was surrounded by family and friends who worked as Sherpas guiding me through the nuisances of Facebook etiquette. 1) Don't post about politics. 2) Don't post about religion: unless you are posting about how awesome Jesus is. 3) Don't post about racism. Basically, I was advised to avoid posting about anything other than cats, babies, and food. 

I was so eager to get reacquainted with some of my old friends that I indiscriminately started sending and accepting friend requests. Within a few days I had over 500 "friends". This was awesome. What I didn't account for was how much some of us had changed over the years. After a while it was obvious some of our lives were in completely different places. This isn’t about being praise worthy or blame worthy. Life happened and we had different priorities. 

The overwhelming majority of my “friends” wanted Facebook to be a place where they could escape from the day to day grind of life. I didn’t know social media was supposed to be fun, and when I found out I didn’t care. All of this was happening so fast. 

I turned my Facebook into my public diary and started journaling. It was cathartic. I wrote what I felt and didn’t care about the consequences. There were days I felt incredibly blessed to be home and have a second chance at life; on those days, I wrote about my feelings. There were days when the world seemed like a flaming bag of crapsicles; on those days I wrote. I didn’t shy away from controversial issues. I was indifferent to the agreed upon rules that governed Facebook. This was seen, by some, as passive aggressive behavior. I lost a lot of those early "friends".

Our society conditions people to avoid “controversy”. We are taught to ignore bigotry, hatred, and incivility. Too many people have bought into the belief that society's ills can be fixed by ignoring them. There are people who believe their right to bliss shouldn’t be impeded by the raw nature of our world. They are wrong! They have every right to ingest or avoid any information they choose, but they don’t have a right to another’s silence. I don’t apologize for the (small) role I’ve played in ruining social media. I don’t apologize for writing about race, religion, class, culture, or politics. I don't apologize for my truth being abrasive against the thin skin of those who choose to run from the world around them. Maybe, If we hadn’t avoided talking about these issues for so long we might understand how they affect us?

Social Media, Self Creation, Glamour Shots, and Justin Bieber

Social media has given us the gift/curse of being able to express our fractal selves in a variety of ways. In society we're (x); at home we're (y), but on social media we can be whoever we want to be. The person in our profiles can be a refined caricature of ourselves or a new creation that reflects our deepest desires. Our social media personas, in many respects, have become as real as our flesh and bones. Jean Baudrillard wrote about this long before the rise of social media in his book Simulacra and Simulation. He theorized, in my opinion correctly, that society had moved to a place where the symbols of reality not only displaced reality but became more real than reality. Baudrillard didn't live long enough to see how much time some of us would spend on our digital footprint compared to cultivating an "authentic self".

I'm old enough to remember the Glamour Shots craze. Glamour Shots and a slew of smaller knockoff companies made a lot of money transforming ordinary people into the version of themselves they always wanted to be: even if those transformations were temporary. Glossy 3x5's and 4x6's served as "facsimiles" of who they could be on their best day. It took a makeup artist, a hair stylist, and airbrush photography to do what a smartphone photo editing app is capable of doing in a few seconds. This technological reality combined with a cyber-world that only loosely resembles reality has changed us in a short period of time.

Creating a new identity is easy. The "social" aspect of social media takes place in a world where authenticity and inauthenticity aren't easily distinguishable. The great Canadian philosopher and social theorist Justin Bieber once wrote, "Facebook is where you lie to your friends. Twitter is where your honest with complete strangers." I don't know if he really said this, but it jibes with some of the experiences I've had dealing with people who have markedly different social media accounts. The popularity of Facebook has caused some to seek their escape on lesser used social media platforms or the comments sections of various websites. A majority of the trolling I've experienced originated from a nom de guerre disconnected from a concrete person. Trolling is prank calling on meth for this digital era. The meekest among us are capable of unleashing vicious attacks from the safety of an identity free from the real world consequences of their actions. In comic books the good guys have alter egos, but on social media the alter egos belong almost exclusively to the villains.

Full disclosure: I haven't transcended the society we live in, and I' m not attempting to define this cultural shift- I'm absolutely certain I don't fully understand what I'm noticing. If you look at my digital footprint you'll get the symbolic representation that I share with the world: a perfectly manicured and air brushed version of myself that lacks the imperfections that are a constitutive part of who I am. Social media has made the task of cultivating an authentic self more difficult than it was just 10 years ago. Before social media self creation was a process that involved defining, through self expression, who you are over and against societal classification systems based on any combination of cultural, racial, sexual, religious, or socioeconomic factors. We've always had the choice of not cultivating a self, but now we can easily upload a reproducible identity that has the same intrinsic value, or (an even scarier proposition) more instrumental value than we have in the material world. I'm curious how this period will be understood by historians, sociologist, philosophers, and psychologists 100 years from now.

Christian Memes: What Do We Really Believe?

Tis, the season for cable and local news outlets to dust off their file footage from the previous years war on Christmas stories. I'm not particularly concerned with the validity of their claims; maybe there is a cabal of Atheists and secular progressives trying to diminish Jesus' role in the holiday season: that may be true. As nefarious as that sounds, I'm more concerned with the apparent lack of faith some of my fellow Christians seem to have when it comes to matters like these.

At the beginning of the school year a similar religious phenomenon happens: Facebook memes about Prayer and God being removed from school spread like wild fire. The law is very clear in these matters anyone who wishes to pray can do so without fear of punishment by an authority figure. The law prohibits someone employed by the state or federal government from leading a prayer and potentially endorsing one religion over another. 

The fact that our schools no longer have structured prayer has been used (by some) to explain the decadence in our society. There's not enough hard evidence to support that claim; correlation doesn't always equal causality. Even if someone could prove that the removal of prayer is the underlying cause of our moral erosion, it doesn't solve the problem of Christians who subscribe to the idea that an omnipotent God could be limited by man's law. 

After every new school shooting memes like the one at the top of this post dominate space on newsfeeds and timelines across social media. The logic is very easy to refute. If you read (and believe) the first verse of the Bible: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Any Christian who believes that the same God who protected Shadrach, Meshach, and Abedego from being consumed by fire, protected Daniel in the lions den, and provided for his people for 40 years in the desert has to listen to a law written by a man who will wither and die needs to get a bit deeper into the word. 

Before there were politicians, school boards, or people to worship him God created everything. When Christians subscribe to the kind of faulty logic these memes offer they sound more like nonbelievers than our Atheists brothers and sisters. How can you believe Jesus overcame the grave and washed our sins away, if you don't think he can get past a hall monitor?

These memes offer a glimpse into the psyche of those who invest in them. It's easy to share a catchy meme, but much harder to come to grips with the evil in our world. The free will we exercise to worship (or not worship) is the same free will that allows someone to open fire on children. It's not easy accepting the terrors of life. There's a season for everything and this too shall pass, but until then I will do my best to fight what I perceive to be the dumbing down of God's people by overly simplistic social media memes.