~ Philip Martin
Each new generation brings new challenges. These challenges arrive from problems within individual families, issues within the church, changes in lifestyle and occupation, and influences from secular culture.
Just in the last hundred years, our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents have dealt with the switch from the horse to the automobile and tractor, with widespread electrification, with a culture that has fallen away from Biblical values, and with likely most dangerous of all, generational wealth. Each of these changes, even those that are clearly good for our quality of life, brings its own problems that we must somehow navigate while keeping ourselves and our children on the true path of faith in Christ.
Today, we are facing a change that like others before it, threatens us and our families. While there are some aspects of digital technology and the Internet that clearly go against Scriptural principles, other aspects seem largely harmless. Herein lies one of the greatest dangers of using technology—these seemingly harmless things can affect our minds without our realizing it. Digital technology and the Internet does this by helping us to more easily feed the carnal desires and sinful nature that have been present in mankind since the Fall.
Feeds Our Desire For Recognition
Every carnal heart harbors pride and a desire for recognition that will strive to preserve and build its reputation at any cost. Past civilizations had only a handful of famous people. A person could achieve fame only through significant actions or abilities. This often required hard work and discipline.
Today this is no longer the case. A measure of fame can be acquired by anyone with a social media account. We become known by people who we do not know. All you need to do is offer yourself up as a spectacle and have others, for whatever reason, take you up on that offer. Fame on social media is similar to being a lottery winner, the fame can be acquired with no discipline, and those who achieve it do not know how to handle its negative side. Young Ava is an example of this type of situation.
Ava was a 14-year-old TikTok star who lived in Florida. An 18-year-old man from Maryland became obsessed with her. When she cut off communication with him, he began stalking her, eventually coming to her home. Her father shot and killed the young man after the young man fired a shotgun through their front door.
Ava felt that the good of her social media interaction outweighed the bad because she got a thrill every morning at the amount of likes on her latest video. Even though the “bad” was an obsessed young man attacking their daughter, Ava’s parents decided to allow her to continue her TikTok account and build her brand.
Young people are not able to process life in the same way as adults. They need guidance from their parents, their God-established protectors. To neglect the responsibility to guide our children in their relationship with digital technology is to neglect a duty given us by God himself.
What about those who want to be like Ava, but who never achieve her status? To them, their lives never seem to match the glamourous snippets they see of others on social media. They can become gripped by a sense of desperation that they somehow can’t measure up. From this, they often conclude that their lives are a failure. In the United States, there is currently an epidemic of 12- to 14-year-old girls attempting suicide due to stress and depression from the pressures of social media.
No, we don’t have a lot of our young ladies taking their lives in our communities, but we are not immune to the demoralizing effects of these artificial lives on social media. The psychology driving social media can draw us and our children in if we are not alert.
Drives Consumption Rather Than Development
God has designed us with reward systems that promote the healthy development of our bodies and minds. These systems are primarily stimulated by appetites that cause us to engage in activities that satisfy these desires. The completion of a given activity releases chemicals that gives our body a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction.
A common example of this reward system in action is the feeling you get after you complete a hard task. Your muscles may be tired and sore, but your body releases hormones (such as endorphins) that make you feel great. The next time you have something hard to do, you subconsciously remember the satisfaction you received from completing a task, and you might even look forward to the hard work.
Eating sugar is a good example of feeding our reward system. Many years ago, we consumed only small amounts of sugar from the fruits, honey, and maple sugar, and it took a lot of work to gather and preserve those sugars. We used little sugar because of the limited supply. Today, we use machines to produce sugar in large quantities. It is readily available, and we add it to nearly everything we eat. We have bypassed the work and discipline required to gather these sweets and go straight to feeding our reward system as much as we like.
The consequences of this are clear. Obesity has become a leading cause of death in the developed world, and much of that obesity is attributed to eating too much sugar. We are essentially separating the reward from the exercise and discipline that the reward circuit was meant to promote.
These reward systems go much further than simply our love for sweets. They are tied into how we learn, how we understand the world, and how we develop healthy relationships. In short, they are God’s gift to us for our maturity and pleasure. However, when we short-circuit these systems with easy alternatives, we are hindering our development.
In what ways are digital media and the Internet driving consumption instead of personal development? Below are several things that are easily accessible through digital technology that can hinder us by replacing a necessary aspect of our development.
Social media replaces real relationships
Video replaces real experience
Porn replaces godly, healthy sexuality
Online shopping replaces exploration and discovery
Podcasts replace reading
While one thing on this list is clearly sinful, the others arguably have legitimate uses. The point here is not to validate or repudiate the use of these things; it is to help us understand how feeding our reward system with these things can hinder our development into the men and women that God would like us to be.
Divides and Addicts Us
Those who run social platforms make their money by selling ads. What if you had a product and you could send advertisements for it to directly the people who were interested in your type of product? Tech companies have the answer. Google and YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, and other similar platforms learn your interests by recording data about what you click on, what you read, and what you watch.
Consequently, the longer they can keep you on their service, the more data they can gather, and the more they can expose you to the ads they sell. Ultimately, the longer they keep you online, the more money they make. To keep you online for longer, they tailor the advertisements and news feeds to best match your interests. As you use their service, the recommended content increasingly becomes focused on what you like.
What are the effects when the information you consume is tailored to keeping you online for as long as possible?
Leads to polarization: It makes you think the issues you focus on are hugely important in the world, and that everyone should agree with your viewpoint.
Leads to Addiction: It provides you a never-ending trail to follow that feeds your specific interests.
As these sites send us content that fits our interests, they continue to offer more and more radical views on the subjects of our preference. We can quickly become unbalanced in a specific line of thinking. Radical commentators usually slant information to misrepresent the opposing side to make the other side look more wrong and make the commentators look more right.
Our tendency is often to find connection with the online community with whom we agree and to reject those close to us whom God placed there to balance us out. More and more, people end up on opposing poles and can’t relate to each other anymore. These extremes are showing up dramatically in the secular world and experts are tracing it back to people’s addiction to consumption. The church is not free from this!
Content tailored to our desires causes us to want to keep going back, then before we realize it, an hour is gone. However, the problem is larger than just the loss of time. The polarizing and addicting material we view breaks our reward system and makes it harder to fully develop healthy relationships. Just like you can’t properly develop your body with an imbalanced diet, neither can you properly develop your mind with things that break your reward system.
The reason addiction and polarization are the focus of these platforms is because they give us a hit of dopamine; in other words, they feed our reward system. The appeal is to consumption rather than development. It feeds your appetites while weakening your mind.
Conclusion
What can the people of God do to resist the influences of social media and the Internet? The first step is to be aware of how the apps and services we use affect the way we think and to clearly see the effects of this consumption. Along with that, we should look to Scripture for direction on how we can protect ourselves and our families.
See then that you walk circumspectly [carefully], not as fools but as wise, redeeming the
Ephesians 5:15, 16 NKJV
time, because the days are evil.
Keep your heart with all diligence [vigilance], For out of it spring the issues of life.
Proverbs 4:23 NKJV
If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is,
Colossians 3:1-2 NKJV
sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the
earth.
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a
Romans 12:1-2 NKJV
living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be
conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may
prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
These verses were written nearly two thousand years before any of us were born, but they still give us enduring truth that we can apply today to direct our lives on the truth path of faith.