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Issues in Social Media

Social media tends to be a bit fad-ish. Memes and ideas explode on the scene, are everywhere for a short period of time, and then tend to drift off into the ether, never to be heard from again. When these memes are cat videos or quotes from celebrities, this appearing and disappearing act doesn’t seem to be a problem. But what about when the social media fads are not cute and amusing, but horrifying and terrible? Whether it be expressing outrage over the situation in Aleppo or being exasperated by the latest instance of police violence against a person of color, real life situations often take on meme-like status via social media: they seem to come out of nowhere, suddenly everyone is talking about them, and then—only a few days later—the issue has disappeared from our radars again. But is it good that real, serious social issues become memes on Facebook or twitter?

On the one hand, bringing people’s attention to issues impacting the lives of our fellow human beings is a good thing. We often live in ignorance of the pain and suffering felt by other people in our community or around the world. Having some light shed on these issues can help us better love our neighbors—and perhaps even reflect on ways we might be unwittingly complicit in some of the events causing this pain. Engaging these issues on social media can provide a starting point for conversations that begin to change hearts and minds.

On the other hand, the meme-ing of social issues can sometimes reduce complex webs of cause and effect into simplistic “good guy v. bad guy” narratives that make it easy to become angered and indignant (almost always at someone else), but do little, if anything, to change the conditions which led to the problem in the first place. WHEN IT BECOMES A STORY OF THE GOOD GUYS AND THE BAD GUYS, WE ALMOST NEVER CAST OURSELVES AS THE BAD GUYSWhen it becomes a story of the good guys and the bad guys, we almost never cast ourselves as the bad guys, and it’s almost never the supposed good guys who are causing the problem. Naturally, if it’s the bad guys’ fault, and I’m not one of the bad guys, then there isn’t much I can do to fix things—except get mad at the bad guys and try to shame them into changing.

And the fad-ish nature of the whole thing also threatens to turn other people’s pain and suffering into fodder for our entertainment, another item to be consumed by our voracious appetite for what’s new. This is not to say that we enjoy the pain and suffering we see. But even if we are saddened by what we see, as long as we are doing it for the sake of our own feelings, it remains largely entertainment, and our indignation at the horrors of Aleppo seem to become one with our sadness at the death of a child on Call the Midwife or our horror at the brutality of war depicted in Vikings or Game of Thrones. If our anger about innocent deaths or racial injustice are the same whether the victims are real people or characters on a television show, we have to ask whether we are paying attention because we care about the issue—or because we somehow enjoy the righteous indignation. Do we want to make things better—or are we just looking for a reason to be aghast at how bad things are?

Of course, not everyone—perhaps not even most people—engaging social issues on social media is doing so for their own benefit. But as we try to evaluate our own engagement with social issues via social media, we need to be honest with ourselves and our own motivations. Are we genuinely being moved, via social media, to better love our neighbor and God’s creation—or are we merely looking for somewhere to direct our anger, fear and anxiety? Are we seeking redemptive reconciliation, or personal catharsis? Do we acknowledge that we are part of the problem (the sinful brokenness of creation), and thereby challenge ourselves to be part of the solution—or are we merely looking to confirm how terrible the world is “out there”, so we can be a bit more smug about how good things are “in here” (whether “in here” means as the Church, or as liberals, conservatives, and whatever other group we may hold dear)?