Soulfood

Many years ago I had a blog. Then I got a Facebook account and stopped blogging.

This is my Facebook soft exit post. Facebook has many useful qualities, most of which revolve around how many users it has and how “easy” that makes it to communicate with people I otherwise wouldn’t be able to interact with at all. It’s great! Except that (at least for me) it isn’t.

Facebook is a medium which, first and foremost, encourages image curation. Each of us is creating content on our Facebook accounts to present an image of ourselves for others’ consumption. We only show others what we want them to see in a highly-constrained environment. It’s not a flaw in Facebook’s design, it is a feature.

Another feature of the Facebook medium’s structure is that it encourages constant comparison. How does my image compare to yours? Am I pretty enough, smart enough, woke enough, compassionate enough, et cetera? It takes conscious effort not to play that game, because the medium itself is subtly and inexorably pushing us to view ourselves in light of the other images we see there.

Facebook also encourages immoderate feedback, by which I mean it promotes urgency and immediacy in interaction. Thoughtful, moderate, cautious engagement of ideas and in conversation is discouraged and subjugated by the medium itself. Again, this is not a flaw – it is a feature, whether intentional or not. React first, think later (or not at all) is one of the rules of engagement inherent in Facebook’s design and presentation.

Perhaps the most damaging feature, in terms of how it affects our interactions, is the lack of context for much of what we post. The image we curate for ourselves is lacking the context of our communal lives. Our thoughts and pictures are presented for public consumption by those who often only primarily know us through the medium of Facebook, which naturally leads to misunderstanding (willful or otherwise), frustration, and the inability to empathize or perceive nuance.

I have experimented in longer form writing on Facebook and worked to raise my standards for engagement, resisting (with varying degrees of success – and many failures) the temptation to give immediate responses when I find content interesting or provocative, but after a dozen years I have concluded that the benefits of being engaged on Facebook do not outweigh the costs. Cursory scrolling essentially reduces the content created by my “friends” to background noise; attempting to engage more deeply rarely leads to a deepening of relationships or mutual understanding commensurate to the amount of time it takes to communicate purposefully with clarity given the constraints/features of the medium. In a world of people longing to love and be loved, what Facebook has to offer doesn’t satisfy and, worse, creates unrealistic expectations which it simultaneously fails to fulfill.

Thus we come to my final complaint. Ultimately, Facebook exists to promote consumption. Certainly via advertising as the content we create using it is analyzed in order to generate sales pitches that manipulate our deepest longings and desires. But also because the constant comparison and measurement against the curated images of others naturally generates discontentment and dissatisfaction. (And not just from comparison to others – I recently viewed some memories and found myself growing envious of who I was and how I looked and what I was doing during a time in my life where my priorities and responsibilities were very different. It was not a fruitful reflection.) And regardless of the source of the dissatisfaction it encourages, Facebook has ready “solutions” for your discontentment in the form of advertising, marketplaces, storefronts, et cetera.

What that means for everyone else, I don’t know. For myself, I’m working my way towards minimizing my participation in Facebook’s ecosystem. I am willing to allow the possibility that Facebook may help me to love God and love neighbor (over loving self and loving self-image) in ways I couldn’t otherwise do, but it is an allowance that requires much thought and careful testing with the expectation that Facebook encourages me towards the latter rather than the former and thus must be guarded against. It certainly allows me the possibility of self-promotion and self-love in a way that no other medium does. It reminds me of something I recently read in The Heart of a Servant Leader by Jack Miller where he wrote the following:

“Perhaps you don’t drift the way that I do, but I constantly forget the deep hole of depravity from which the Lord’s mighty love rescued me. Drifting does not take any effort at all; just stop cultivating the knowledge of Christ, and the evil current of secularism does the rest.” (C. John Miller, The Heart of a Servant Leader)

Facebook makes it easy to drift, easy to fall into self-loving and self-promoting patterns, easy to take my eyes off of Christ and instead stare at the things of earth and fall into a spiral of dissatisfaction and unhealthy consumption. Use with extreme caution, or not at all – and make sure you have accountability partners who will lovingly rebuke you when you use it to love yourself over others, so you can keep yourself in check. If you can’t use it to cultivate your knowledge of Christ, seriously consider eschewing it altogether.

Peace,

Jacob

For further reading:

The Common Rule by Justin Whitmel Earley, for a discussion of the addictiveness of social media scrolling and seeking for validation

12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You by Tony Reinke

When People Are Big and God is Small by Ed Welch

The Heart of a Servant Leader by C. John Miller