getting to the heart of social media
a new series on how the gospel impacts how you use social media.
“The young are born to the human condition more than to their time, and they face mainly the same trials and obligations as their elders have faced.” — Wendell Berry
The moment I got home from orientation the summer before my freshman year of college, I went straight to my family’s computer with my new prized possession: a .edu college email address. It was 2005, and having a .edu email address meant that you could sign up for this new college-only site called The Facebook, its original name.
A college-aged friend had told me about this new website where you could become "friends" with people online. Eager to try it out, I made an account, uploaded a profile picture, and added a few people I knew. I wasn’t sure why I needed to be friends with people online but it all felt fresh and exciting.
You’ve no doubt had a similar experience. A friend has gushed to you about some new app with a strange name like Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok. Drawn in by the desire to see what other people are up to, you make your own account. You’re not sure how to use this strange app, but don’t want to feel left out. Before you know it, you’re using it every day.
Like all innovative technologies, social media seemed like magic at first. Social media became the place to post pictures from college parties, become “Facebook official,” or kill time before you did your homework. Whether you watched YouTube videos with your college friends or spent high school keeping your snap streaks alive, social media began to influence so much of your life. Even if you rarely posted, social media was still there, creating the context of what it meant to be a young adult.
In those golden years of social media, our culture told us to indulge in these apps. Spurred on by start-up founders and their IPO dreams, we were encouraged to see social media as an unquestionable good and incorporate it into every area of life. It promised a connected future, and if we wanted to reach our potential as a culture, we needed to embrace this new technology and the progress it promised.
But as dozens of other social media apps joined the space that Facebook carved out, social media evolved from a quirky niche for college students to the most powerful communication tools ever created. Social media companies perfected their ability to capture our attention, and soon these apps became the dominant social experience in youth culture.
With each new feature, whether it was a news feed, infinity scrolling, or retweeting, young people spent more and more time on social media. Soon, young people couldn’t let go of their phones, addicted the the high of notifications, likes, and being in the know.
But like with every addiction, the buzz of social media soon turned into an overdose, as young people began to struggle with more anxiety, discouragement, and depression than ever. In true addict form, we’d sleep off our hangover, only to wake up and reach for our phones again, desperate for our social media fix.
Eventually, some people started to push back against the social media’s cultural takeover. Anti-social media books, podcasts, and documentaries began to pop up, citing scary statistics about the dangers of our app addiction. Now, almost two decades into this brave new world, these apps that we invited into our lives when they were cute little puppies have grown into cultural beasts beyond anyone’s control.
so what should be done with social media?
Now, we’re all asking, “What should we do with social media?” Is there any way that we enjoy the creativity and connection that social media brings, while also addressing the damaging side effects that our online world incentivizes? Can you preserve the good of social media while dissipating the toxic cloud of anger, anxiety, and brokenness that hovers over youth culture? In short, is there any way to fix social media?
Many podcasts, books, and articles believe they have the solutions to our social media problems, fitting into one of three main categories. Depending on their perspective, they advise you to:
Completely withdraw from social media: this group exhorts you with a religious zeal to immediately delete all of your social media apps. To them, social media is so evil, insidious, and destructive that you shouldn’t use it at all. The negatives of social media so outweigh the positives that it should be shunned forever.
Set up restrictions on social media: this group see value in social media, but view it more as a necessary evil, something that will overwhelm your willpower without strict self-discipline and rules. They encourage you to do things like keep your phone away from your bed, stack your phones at restaurants, and use things like timers, limits, and “digital breaks” to break your phones power over you.
Remind yourself of platitudes: these people like social media, but try to cope with its downsides through repeating platitudes like “You are enough,” “Don’t compare your ordinary to their highlight reel,” and “Progress, not perfection.” This group believes that if you can get into the right headspace, you can mitigate social media’s adverse effects.
While these three solutions to our social media problem appear different, they share the same diagnosis: they believe our core problem is social media. But in placing all the blame on social media, they misunderstand the root of the issue, which mean that none of their solutions improve our relationship with social media.
While the scorched earth response of the first approach offers the simple answer of “delete everything,” too much of our lives have migrated to social media for it to be practical. Unless your a 50-year-old dad in the suburbs, withdrawing from social media puts you on an island, isolated from all of your peers. And while it’s easy to romanticize some pre-social media golden age, those cultures faced the same struggles we do.
The second approach, to set up restrictions on your phone, sounds great, but let’s be honest; rules do little to restrain your phone use. These rules provide the illusion of resisting social media, but following them is like trying to put out a forest fire with a squirt gun. Social media rules may help you feel superior to your peers, but if rules fixed willpower, no one would be overweight, unkind, or in debt.
The last approach, to encourage yourself through mantras, is a social media darling, yet it never leads to lasting fruit. These phrases at least show an awareness of social media’s problem, but they are just a band-aid on a bullet hole. Using platitudes and affirmations to change your life are like trying to cheer up a crying baby with symbolic logic; they help you feel like you’re doing something but don’t address the real issue.
We bounce between these three approaches, trying to utilize social media’s strengths without being overwhelmed by its drawbacks. We often end up feeling helpless in the social media storm, tossed to an fro by its culture-shaping power, yet too addicted to the highs to admit that we’re tired of the lows.
So how do you find a way forward? Social media has become a fixture in our lives, and despite the many negatives, they do provide helpful tools. Pandora’s box has been opened, after all, and these app aren’t going to just fade away. So the question now becomes: is there any way to break social media’s toxic stranglehold in our lives while still enjoying its strengths?
Maybe I’m too optimistic, but I believe there is.
To solve this problem, we have to flip our approach to fixing social media. We’re all convinced that our problems with social media are cause by social media, so we point our finger at a cadre of tech companies and let ourselves off the hook. We cheer as Congress hauls Mark Zuckerberg to the Capital every couple of years to chastise him for destroying America, before we go back to scrolling Instagram.
changing how we see our social media problems
While there are problems with how social media is designed, we won’t make progress until we admit that our root problem with social media exists in us and not in an app. As the popular social media figure Gary Vaynerchuck says, “Social media doesn’t change anything, it just reveals who you actually are.” While he goes too far in that statement, the gist is correct: social media hasn’t so much changed people as much as it’s allowed them to display who they truly are.
So rather than rebuke social media companies, we need to address the real issue: there’s something wrong with us. Everything you do on social media, whether good or bad, isn’t caused by an app, but according to the Bible, comes from your heart. Proverbs says that your heart that is the wellspring of your life and everything bubbles up from it.
Now in the Bible, your heart isn’t a four-chambered organ ticking in your chest, but rather the core of who you are. That’s why if you want to see change in how you use social media, you need to stop obsessing over your thumbs and start exploring your heart. You have to admit that our struggle with social media flows primarily out of our messed up hearts.
While this message might rankle modern ears, it’s not anything new. Jesus tried to convince his culture of the same truth 2,000 years ago. People in Jesus’ day were just like us, blaming their culture’s problems on external things. They believed that you were corrupted by what was around you, not by what was in you.
But when the religious accused Jesus and his disciples of not following all the right external rules, Jesus challenged their mindset. He asked them:
Are you so dull? Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, and slander. These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.
Through these words, Jesus introduced a ground-breaking view of human nature: sin and evil don’t originate in things out there in society, but rather in here, in your heart. Our problems originate in our hearts and then flow out to society.
So how does this apply to social media? It means that your core problem with social media starts in your heart. While social media is designed to channel you towards certain behaviors, the core issue isn’t an app but rather the hearts of the people who use these apps.
Even if you removed social media forever, these same cultural problems would still be around. That’s why if we want to make real progress on them, we need to dig into what’s going on in our hearts.
If Jesus tried to solve social media like most people, he would’ve taught, “Someday there’s going to be this terrible thing called social media. I’d prefer you stayed off of it, but if you can’t, at least give it up for Lent!” But Jesus knew the futility of trying to solve sin this way. That’s why He taught:
"The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks."
Jesus knew sin flows out of the heart, which is why he engaged in the messiness of his culture, rather than hiding out in a cave to cut down on opportunities to sin. While Jesus taught his followers to deal with sin in radical ways (“If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off.”), he knew that the key to holiness wasn’t your environment but your heart.
So how can you change your heart to produce good and not evil? Jesus taught one answer again and again: you have to be born again and have your heart transformed through the power of Jesus’ resurrection. The Apostle Paul summarized being born again when he wrote, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone; the new has come!”
When you ignore your heart and try to fix your problems with social media by either withdrawing or rule-following, you’re trying to conform your heart through external pressure rather than transform it through inner renewal. Paul warns of the futility of this approach when he says:
Why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: ‘Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!’ These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.
Despite your best efforts, external social media rules can’t stop your sinful nature. That’s why the answer to our social media issues aren’t found in rules or congressional hearings, but in understanding how Jesus’ gospel can make renew your heart. The gospel isn’t just about getting you into heaven but is the message of how God gets heaven into you, by regenerating and renewing your heart.
My goal for these essays isn’t to guilt trip you into giving up social media, but to help you explore your heart: how have you been using social media to give you what only God can provide? These essays won’t contain tips or tricks about using social media, but will seek to help you understand what’s going on in your heart.
Through these essays, I want to help you change from a social media-saturated life to a life of gospel-saturated social media. While this might seem impossible, God promises in Ezekiel 36 that:
“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.”
Ezekiel goes on to say that when the surrounding society see how God transforms the hearts of His people, they’ll be blown away by the flourishing it creates. They’ll say, “This land that was laid waste has become like the Garden of Eden.”
That’s God’s promise to you: if you let God renew your heart, He’ll transform how you use social media, so that as other people interact with you online, they’ll be amazed and says, “That’s how social media’s supposed to be!”
I’m 36, which means I’ve spent half my life on social media. While there are no quick fixes for our social media problems, I’ve learned there’s so much good available for those who will examine their hearts and let God transform them from the inside out.