3-31-23 Bulletin

“Great Lent & Social Media”

There is no denying the fact that social media is a major obstacle to the spiritual life of Orthodox Christians. The internet, a global spiderweb of instant “communication,” is everywhere, present, and filling most of our private and public spaces. The content of this communication, piped through the internet into our computers and smart-phones, though occasionally useful (articles, essays, e-books, etc.), is endlessly distracting. In this way, we have become a culture wholly addicted to the cyber vanities of “selfies” and 5-second TikTok reels. Studies now show that for every single hour college students apply to actual studying, they spend another 2 hours on social media; workers at their offices are interrupted by social media every 10 minutes adding up to an economic loss of $650 billion a year. All in all, Americans devote 12 billion aggregate hours every year scrolling, mindlessly, through social media.

Some would label this a simple past-time—no different than watching a sitcom on TV or listening to music on the radio. But from an Orthodox standpoint, we cannot help but to recognize how dangerously demeaning and dehumanizing our “internet use” has grown. For example, the internet pretends to solve problems with human communication. Though it has certainly sped up the connections between human beings living all over the world, it has nevertheless diminished, if not even nullified, the art of true conversation between human beings. That is, it has created a software barrier between human beings that distorts the dynamic of genuine human conversing. Or to state it in another way, the internet has annuled the ability of human beings to converse with each other, directly and personally.

Even texting, though person-to-person, cannot be considered conversation because it eliminates other features of the human conversations that are just as essential as the “words,” such as voice inflection, tone, and most crucially, facial expressions. How to know when someone, in a text, makes a statement that they mean to be true or simply made in jest? These are things that only vocal tone and facial expressions can convey. The upshot of this is the paradoxical reality that we now live in a world where more and more people are connected through their smart-phones, but where the art of conversation has been totally obliterated.

In political spheres, this has had quite obvious and devastating consequences. Liberals and conservatives are more likely to inhabit their own self-created cyber-caves where they play a game of “paint-ball calumny” against each other, shooting and lobbing insults towards “enemies” they see only on media screens. In the past, debates were both lively and civil, because both sides were not only in close physical proximity to each other (“contextualized”) but because both sides respected the rules governing the debate, such as “We can agree to disagree.” Nothing remotely close to this exists any longer. And we pay a sore price for it. In other words, we are a nation that is deeply fractured along party lines, not because we merely disagree with each other (which in times past was seen as necessary), but because we no longer enter into conversations with those whom we disagree— something which in the life of the Church is an unimaginable reality! (See Acts 15).

Great Lent for us as Orthodox Christians must, for this reason, be more than just an occasion to spend “less time” on social media. No, it must be a time when we are literally rescued from the worst of its outcomes: from its isolating solipsism, from its mind-numbing diversions, from its flight from reality, from its pervasive pornography which has hypersexualized our youth, and most dangerously, from its ever increasing black and white polarized demagoguery of division and hate. We might even realize that behind the companies who operate these social media platforms, who seek nothing less than the complete surrender of BOTH mind and focus, our attention and thinking, are other more nefarious and unseen forces who seek to destroy our human race. Previous generations of believers understood this clearly. Our generation, clearly, does not, as it seems bent on pouring itself down the drain into the hell of abhorrence and hate.

Fr. Paul Jannakos