Antisocial Media: Why We Are Angry on the Internet

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Angry man, weak manI’ve been using the Internet since it was the old DARPANET, having sent my first email in fall 1981. Though I obviously use the medium, I am not  a fan.

Over the years, I’ve seen the conversation on the Internet turn more shrill and caustic. It especially bothers me when Christians add to the acid. Something about the Internet can bring out the worst in us, particularly when it comes to things interpersonal.

A couple weeks ago, I had lunch with Rick Ianniello, a fellow Christian and Cincinnati-area blogger, and we started to touch on the phenomenon of being angry on the Internet. In keeping with the gist of that talk, I’ve ruminated on that face-to-face conversation and want to share a few thoughts.

In fact, I’m going to jump right in and post my basic points:

People still desire interaction with others.

The inflammatory draws us because it provides points for interaction.

In a world of wrong, something in us needs to be seen as being a defender of what is right.

“An eye for an eye” is embedded in our sense of rightness.

Because Internet communication is so instant, its fleeting nature demands we respond instantly or else face exclusion from interaction.

People  still desire interaction with others.

And thus completes the cycle.

I believe that this cycle explains much about our conversation through social media on the Internet and the way we interact with others through this faceless medium.

Thoughts:

Without a doubt, I spend far less time in face-to-face conversation with others. The excuse I hear is that people are so busy. I find it odd, though, that the vacuum that is the average day is increasingly filled with electronic communication, often hours of it. When someone posts an unusual (and often inflammatory) bit of info on the Internet, time was spent finding and reading that info. Add enough of that together and hours go by.

In a way, we suffer from a collective forgetful delusion: We no longer recall how we spent our time before the digital came to rule us. How did we interact before Facebook? How did we communicate before texting? How did we accumulate knowledge before Google? Instead of what we once did, which seemed to make us happy, we have substituted something else, and few of us are asking if we’ve made the right trade.

I used to spend a great deal of time talking with friends over a good meal. Now that almost never occurs.

But we humans still crave connectedness with others, so we post on Facebook or comment on blogs. It used to be long emails, but email is passé and Twitter taught us to condense everything into 140 characters. So we do.

And the way to generate conversation on the Internet is to post links to weird, interesting, or inflammatory statements we, or those who inform our worldview, make. Like the matador waving a red cape, we want the bull to notice us—except in this case, the bull is another person from whom we seek interaction.

We’re suckers for the red cape, aren’t we? It’s something in us. Both in waving it and reacting to it we reaffirm that we have significance at a time when so much of life seems pointless, redundant, and stupid.

“See? The bull charged. I still matter.”

We all want to matter. In the United States especially, inconsequence is a mortal sin. There’s always a cause to defend, an opinion to be had. Our democracy is built on the ideas of people who could not sit idly by without letting their thoughts be known. Something always has to be said. The Internet brings that ability to say anything about everything like no other medium in history. It is the public square on a globe-spanning level. Under that magnifying glass, every statement becomes inflammatory to someone.

So we react with what we’ve been taught from the Old Testament school of justice: an eye for an eye. If someone hits me verbally, I hit them back. I take their accusation and reverse it so that it hits them. Their strike is my counterstrike.

That sense of conversational revenge drives what passes for discourse nowadays. Few people ask whether it makes sense to lunge at the matador’s flung cape. They react with an animal’s mind and charge. That spear in their back demands a horn to the gut. And we witness all the gore played out in a public space.

Like a genuine bullfight, our reflexes must be lightning fast or else we get left out of the action. Who hasn’t come to an interesting Facebook post a couple hours afterward and found 25 comments and an already burned-out conversation? The matador and picadores went home. The flowers are already wilting in the ring. Too late.

The Internet waits for no man.

Impatience is the worst failing to pair with the inflammatory, and it’s here that we see the genesis of the anger that has come to dominate the Internet conversation and spill over into all other forms of discourse.

Before newspapers started to die because they are not fast enough to keep up with the lightning pace of information today, there was the letter to the editor. The op-ed section of the paper was our public arena for anger.

But the funny thing about a letter in those days was that it took time to write and mail. Plus, the conversation lagged by a few days. The inflammatory story of Tuesday became the slightly peeved letter to the editor of Friday. In the meantime, everyone had taken a few deep breaths and calmed down.

Whenever I was angry enough to write a seething letter, it’s funny how the seethe eased out of me as I wrote by hand. And more often than not, when I was truly livid, Jesus often said to me, “Why don’t you sit on this one for a day?” And I would. Ironic how many of those letters never got mailed. Something about a day passing made the anger of the moment seem like nothing more than an ill-thought, knee-jerk reaction.

Today, our online conversation demands the ill-thought, knee-jerk reaction. In fact, without that automatic, instant response, the Internet loses its raison d’être and no longer becomes the necessary touchpoint we have made it.

That said, for a lot of people, the Internet and social media are the only touchpoint with others they still possess. Yet what a sad trade this has been, as something precious has been lost in our rush to life online and too much coarseness has been gained.

People seem unhinged nowadays. Too many of us think we alone are the arbiters of all truth. Just witness the craziness in the aftermath of the death of Osama bin Laden, when people demanded to see his death pictures so they would believe. We’ve reached a point where only my seeing and my opinion define truth.

Christians need to take this all back and react differently. This is what we say we believe:

I am dust, a vapor that passes through today and is gone tomorrow.

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, even me.

I am to esteem my neighbor better than myself.

I am to love my enemies and pray for those who hate me.

All the law and the prophets are summed up in loving God and loving my neighbor, for love is the pinnacle.

Truth is truth apart from what I think or say; it can stand on its own and will go on without me.

The wise listen much and speak little.

“An eye for an eye” has been replaced by incomprehensible mercy, even in the face of hatred.

No one is unredeemable until he or she draws that final breath, so I must trust God in His dealings with people, particularly foes.

God has been patient with me and my slow growth, so I must be patient with others.

Jesus did not break the bruised reed or snuff the smoldering wick, and neither should I.

God made us to depend on each other because each of us is differently gifted by Him.

If you and I forsake gathering together in person, we lose something invaluable.

I can spend hours unpacking those realities for you, but you are smart people. You know how they should apply to our discourse and how we interact with others.

Now if we would only believe those truths enough to practice them, think how the world—even the online one—would be different.

When Being “Discerning” Isn’t, Part 1

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One of the things that bothers me most about living in a culture mired in spotlights is the sheer number of forums and opportunities available to say or do something foolish in public. Within that subset of bother, nothing makes me slap my forehead faster than shining the spotlight on Christians who haven’t thought through all the ramifications of their theologies or who make the most appalling statements when a mic is shoved under their nose.

I fully admit that I am one of those people whose mouth runs faster than his brain. Let me talk long enough and the chance that I’ll inadvertently say something that grossly offends someone runs to about 1:1 odds. People who know me only through the blog probably consider me some deep, intellectual introvert with a bit of Old Testament prophet mixed in. In other words, kind of scary. Fact is, I’m a big, motormouth chucklehead who spends most of his time laughing—and sticking my foot in his mouth at some point in the conversation because I don’t know enough to shut up.

That said, I am a much more reflective person than I used to be. I’m not nearly as hard on other people or myself than my former persona of “angry young man destined to change the world singlehandedly.” Which is why the whole issue of discernment in the real world is one that never leaves my thoughts.

We just can’t seem to get discernment right. And if we can’t get discernment right, then nothing else in life will function as it should.

A couple weeks ago, a conversation in the comments of Tim Challies’s blog brought this home. Tim had posted a link to a blog post on another blogger’s site. That blogger argued that Christians should not friend ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends on Facebook. Here’s the reasoning:

I believe that all relationships in my life either support or detract from my marriage, however tacitly, and they stay or go based on that criterion. I believe spouses should have access to each others’ phones and e-mails and should approve of each others’ Facebook friends. I believe privacy with exes, even and perhaps particularly virtual privacy, is dangerous. I’m on the road I chose, and no good will come from revisiting roads not taken.

C.S. Lewis said this:

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.

Lewis’s rationale can be extrapolated to mean that we can think that there will never be a demon lurking around the next corner or we will think that one will always be awaiting us.

I believe the wisdom of Lewis’s statement applies to all aspects of the Christian life. We may find it easy to believe that money is neither intrinsically good nor evil, but we often find it impossible to think that some other aspects of life also fall into that same gray or neutral area. We want our good and our evil clearly delineated.

Yet life is not always black and white. When Christians automatically flee to those poles, we’ve abandoned discernment for a knee-jerk reaction.

In the case of the anti-ex blogger, her error is found in the automatic dichotomy imposed on human relationships. She believes that every relationship is either helping or hurting her marriage.

Perhaps I’m a serious backslider here, but who frames life that way? Isn’t that automatically assuming that evil lurks behind every corner? Isn’t that falling into a trap of unhealthy concern about everything that might possibly go wrong? Is it impossible for anything, even friending a former flame on Facebook, to be neutral?

My son’s bus driver warned him that he could not read on the bus anymore because some girl was reading, got jostled, and the corner of the book flew up and bruised her eye. So now on the school bus (emphasis on school) it’s a crime to read a book.

That’s where this kind of “anything might go wrong” discernment always leads.

Folks who advocate to live that way always call on the same verses:

Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.
—1 Corinthians 6:18

But as for you, O man of God, flee these things.
—1 Timothy 6:11a

Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry.
—1 Corinthians 10:14

That’s a lot of fleeing. And when applied rightly in the right situations, it’s a proper response.

However, the problem is that fleeing is but one option, the most drastic one. It’s not the sole option for dealing with life that works for most cases. For a good example of when it’s appropriate to flee, consider this:

Now Joseph was handsome in form and appearance. And after a time his master’s wife cast her eyes on Joseph and said, “Lie with me.” But he refused and said to his master’s wife, “Behold, because of me my master has no concern about anything in the house, and he has put everything that he has in my charge. He is not greater in this house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except yourself, because you are his wife. How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?” And as she spoke to Joseph day after day, he would not listen to her, to lie beside her or to be with her. But one day, when he went into the house to do his work and none of the men of the house was there in the house, she caught him by his garment, saying, “Lie with me.” But he left his garment in her hand and fled and got out of the house. And as soon as she saw that he had left his garment in her hand and had fled out of the house…
—Genesis 39:6b-13

Given what a lot of Christians endorse concerning relationships, it was a bad idea for Joseph to even set foot in Potiphar’s house in the first place, given that he was single man in the home of a married woman. But Joseph didn’t flee that situation right away, did he? Somehow, he resisted, as it notes, “day after day.”

Eventually, though, Potiphar’s wife trapped Joseph in a no-win situation, grabbing ahold of his clothing, and offering him the classic proposition again. So he fled.

In other words, the situation was so bad that fleeing finally became the only option.

How Joseph reacted throughout the entirety of his dealings with his master’s wife is how we must rationally apply the “flee model” of dealing with temptation.

In my conversation in the comments over at Tim Challies’s blog, a commenter who advocated the flee model for even the least issue eventually got to the point where he questioned whether youth groups of mixed sexes were a good idea because they don’t allow a good option for fleeing.

If that’s where we are in the Christian Church today, then we’ve lost the battle. We might as well barricade ourselves in our rooms alone. When our first instinct is to flee at the slightest temptation, then we are no longer practicing discernment. Instead, we have become slaves of finding a demon lurking around every corner.

Here’s the verse that mature Christians apply in most cases of temptation:

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
—James 4:7

And this:

Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.
—Ephesians 6:11

Real Christians in a real world must navigate through gray. It’s why the Holy Spirit was put inside us. He’s our guide to dealing with issues that are unclear or those that have yet to descend to flight. He’s also the one who gave Joseph the will to say no day after day until it got so bad that fleeing became the only option.

In the case of friending ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends on Facebook, no blanket “helping my marriage or harming it” dichotomy exists in the real world.

Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well

Single man + "married" woman = flee?

Both you and the Holy Spirit know which exes it would be okay to friend and which it wouldn’t. Listen to what the Lord shows you about your own weakness and be mature about it.

And let’s also be mature and acknowledge that in a world of two sexes attracted to each other, we’re going to have to employ some other method than resorting to fleeing at the least attraction.

As an older married man, I want to speak honestly to younger men and those who have never been married but anticipate it some day: There will be times when you are attracted to women who are not your wife. Those women may even be the wives of your friends. You may attend a party with a lot of other couples, and before you walked into that party, you and your wife had some major fight about something stupid. When that other woman at the party lends you an ear, there might be a spark of attraction in that moment.

Discernment acknowledges forthrightly that such situations will arise. Discernment also acknowledges that flight is not always an option unless you want to be a complete idiot with no friends who makes his wife constantly suspicious of his seemingly unbridled lust.

The wise person must employ some other means of dealing with these kinds of situations. That’s real discernment. And it’s real Christian maturity too.

In my next post, I’ll talk about another discernment issue that even the most learned Christians fumble.

Tech, the Church, and the Death of Community

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Everybody’s talking at me.
I don’t hear a word they’re saying,
Only the echoes of my mind.

— Harry Nilsson, “Everybody’s Talking At Me”

I now sit behind a Plexiglas wall.

It’s about five feet high and surrounds most of my drum kit. To drown out the deafening wall of sound reflected off the barrier from my drumming, I wear in-ear monitors that seal off everything but the mix (which I’m not in).

When the rest of the worship team talks to each other, I don’t hear them. Or I get a strange, far away echo picked up from the stage mics. Disembodied voices that seem to come from nowhere, yet everywhere, the words mingling into murk.

There’s a vibe you get as a musician playing in a band. When everyone’s doing their thing right, you gain a sixth sense of where the music is going. You can riff off what others do. You feel a part of something bigger than yourself and your contribution to the music. It’s almost a rapturous thing.

Unless you sit cut off in your own little room.

As of the start of the year, I now sit behind a Plexiglas wall. And jammed in my head are tiny, sophisticated speakers supposedly keeping me connected to the outer world.

It’s a perfect metaphor.

I’ve been on Facebook about a year. I think it has replaced my normal community, not because I wanted it to, but because it’s what others I know have rushed to embrace.

I think everyone is rushing. Not a single small group I’m a part of meets regularly anymore. No one can find a place on the schedule. Which is why Facebook is appealing. You and I can maintain the semblance of a relationship to other humans by texting from a Blackberry all the fun things we’re doing by ourselves.

I long ago gave up scheduling parties. Trying get three couples together face-to-face to do anything is akin to mounting an expedition to Everest.

So we text. And the Facebook walls fill up with graffiti.

I read fewer blogs anymore. It’s a lot of text from people who increasingly seem like the imaginary friends of my childhood. I find it a bit disturbing. That line in Ecclelsiastes that reads that the making of books has no end was long before the profusion of text bombarding us from every direction, most of it utterly throwaway.

We have all these high tech devices to help us communicate, but as I see it, there’s never been less genuine, lasting communication than there is today.

Below is just a sampling of news stories I’ve seen recently (and yes, I understand the circular nature of that statement):


‘Internet Addiction’ Linked to Depression, Says Study

Could it be that something about our society today causes depression, and those most affected by it are the ones seeking a respite in the “approved” source of modern comfort, the Internet?

Computers Can’t Replace Us
Tech pundit Jaron Lanier laments the dumbing down of interaction and the lost sense of identity that the Internet fosters.

The Teens Who Can Barely Talk
What happens when a person’s vocabulary reflects only words found in the most commonly texted phrases?

In Praise of Online Obscurity
When Wired magazine wonders if all this social media is only robbing our relational bank accounts and diluting effective communication, well…

The Facebook Myth
Plenty of cause-joining, quiz-taking, and online activity, but does it amount to so much self-pleasuring and sloth?

I look at what is happening to communication and connection and wonder why we need this tech middleman to work as a go-between that links you and me to real life. I wonder if the depressed person is the one caught in the move away from the kind of face-to-face community cachet that used to fill our relational bank accounts. I read the above articles and I’m chilled by them.

And now I want to make one of the most bold statements I think I’ve ever made on Cerulean Sanctum:

In all my years of watching the Church, I’ve never seen an individual church improved by technology, only diminished by it.

I want to add that there is a difference between lifeblood and convenience. Tech can make things more convenient. Having a computer and color laserpinter to design and print the church bulletins is great for convenience. But no computer or laserprinter can build the core functions of the Church. And when we confuse convenience with lifeblood, look out.

Yet how is it that churches are spending collective billions to become more tech savvy? How is it that upgrading the sound system in the church can become more important than helping a member fix her car or pay a bill he cannot pay due to job loss?

And how is it that we think we can insert tech into the basics of the faith and make them better? We had hymnals, then overhead projectors, then Powerpoint slide shows, and now we have the words of the music we sing to God backed by a full-blown media presentation complete with a 24-fps YouTube video of other people worshiping and capped by a Blue Angels flyover.

How can we not understand what we’re losing?

We can plaster our church lobbies with costly flat-panel displays showing stock photo slideshows of smiling, fair-haired people with nice teeth telling visitors to our church just how much we love them, Monkey in a cageyet those very same visitors can walk out without a handshake and a genuine human being who says, “Hey! Come join my wife and me for lunch after the service.”

We can pour line after line of text into Facebook and still not understand that our “friends” are desperate to truly connect with other people, yet no longer know how.

We can grow jealous of the person who has the tech device we don’t, which allows him or her to communicate in a way we can’t afford.

We can continue to buy into the marketing that we must surround ourselves with yet one more tech gizmo we didn’t know we truly needed—and then miss the reality that none of us seem to get together anymore.

And we can fill our churches with millions of bucks worth of tech, only to find each of us behind a Plexiglas wall, our in-the-ear monitors failing to pick up the full conversation, as we wonder what happened to that freeing vibe we used to feel in the music of real community.

I can’t help but think that technology is turning our human conversations into white noise, even as it isolates us and leads us to a place of asking if anyone really, truly cares.