Day 16: Jealousy, Anger, and Viciousness on Social Media

Jan 29, 2020

#RethinkChurch is doing a 22-day journey for self-reflection based on John Wesley’s 22 questions. I am composing short blog posts addressing each question. I am using these posts to encourage Christians, especially Progressive and Mainline Christians to reflect deeply on what it means to be Church in a world marred by oppression and violence.

Day 16: Am I jealous, impure, critical, irritable, touchy, or distrustful?

I can tell you right now, John Wesley was not thinking about social media when he was asking this question. But social media is such an integral part of many of our lives that I could not help but think about the ways social media use influences our emotions-for better or for worse.

Like most people, I have a love-hate relationship with social media. I love that social media has given me the ability to keep tabs on old friends and peers from throughout my many years of schooling while also providing me with the opportunity to meet people that I most likely would never have interacted with.

I love how social media provides me with the platform to share my writing with other people and read the works of others who are also trying to figure out what it means to believe in God in 2020.

And of course, social media exposes me to an untold number of adorable photos of babies and animals, which honestly, if that’s all social media consisted of, would be more than enough to justify its existence.

But, like anything, social media has its draw backs, some of them very significant. The information available on social media can be overwhelming. We can see tragedies unfolding, live, before our very eyes from the latest mass shooting in the United States to protestors being shot down and killed throughout the world. This overwhelming amount of information can numb us and cause us to shut down. It’s not that we don’t care about what is going on in the world, but at a certain point we hit our emotional limit on the amount of tragedies we can process. The amount of injustice we are exposed to can make us cynical and feed into our despair.

Social media also provides an opportunity for viciousness. People tear into total strangers for absolutely no reason. People get into debates that quickly devolve into ad hominem attacks. Of course, this happens in person as well. But social media provides an opportunity for more and more people to pile on in their attacks. We seem to forget that berating someone will very rarely get them to change their mind and concede you were right.

Social media can also inspire jealousy. Instagram, especially, is one venue where people carefully curate their posts. More often than not they upload photos of the good times: them hanging out with friends, their achievements, the perfect family photo. None of that is wrong of course. Who doesn’t want to share the best moments of their lives?

The problem arises when we forget how curated venues like Instagram are. Instagram only captures one particular moment in a person’s life. This is why if you only look at a person’s social media you can be fooled into thinking that everything is going perfectly in their life. You then begin to second guess your own life.

You wonder why you aren’t as successful, beautiful, or happy as the people on your feed, not recognizing that someone is probably saying the same thing about you. Others probably look at the carefully crafted version of your life that you present online and wonder why they couldn’t be just like you.

I am not claiming that social media is an unmitigated evil. Far from it. I believe it has a lot of good features. I am not even going to say we should limit the time we spend on it, since that is something, I struggle with. (I had to download a website blocker and schedule a set period of time to avoid going on twitter and even then, I’m not always successful. Lolol).

However, we need to be much more aware about our interaction and consumption of social media. We need to remember that there are other people on the receiving end of our tirades. Social media often only provides a two-dimensional portrayal of someone, and it is easy to take that depiction at face value and forget we are talking to human beings.

We also cannot allow how people present themselves on social media to fool us into thinking that their lives are perfect and we are unmitigated failures. We never know what a person is going through once they step away from their laptop.