Like many writers, Flannery O’Connor once observed that she didn’t really know what she thought about anything until she’d written about it, and I suspect that became true for many as we became a keyboarding, text-based digital society.
In retrospect, some of what we were thinking turned out to have been wrong-headed or plain stupid, but 20 years ago, as the century turned and blogs proliferated, it felt like we were all engaged in the discovery of our own thinking — figuring out who we really were, based on our words, which were revealing us to ourselves.
How fascinating we were! How enthralling to post a thought and find engagement with others in the comments section! For a while we were even talking to each other in good faith — challenging but also listening, considering the other guy’s opinions. I frequently likened it to an Irish Cyberpub, where one could meet up, engage in good-natured argumentation that (occasionally) could even change one’s perspective, and go at it again next day with no hard feelings.
We should have known better, of course. Hadn’t we already learned that bringing TV screens into every facet of life meant losing a measure of control over who (and what) was being admitted into our homes, influencing our families and impacting our minds, our morals, our material values and our social make-up?
Eventually, especially with the advent of social media, the effect of more screens, more thoughts, more “world,” (now held in our very hands) brought that black-mirrored effect into a toxic hyperdrive. The heyday of guileless digital discussion devolved, curdling into screaming distrust and lunatic malice that has brought us to a place where moral denunciations and cries of heresy (religious or political) become justifications for life-ruining events: a stupid joke must destroy a career; feeling disrespected warrants publishing home addresses for public harassment.
The Irish Cyberpub has disappeared, replaced with a noisy, agenda-agitated miasma of predictable pronouncements and pointlessness. With any headline, one knows exactly what a particular pundit (and we are all pundits, now) will say before looking, and so logging on is increasingly unnecessary.
As is posting, in fact. Perhaps we’ve all written so much we’ve confounded Flannery’s rule, and know our thinking all too well, which means we’ve actually stopped thinking, period. Jane Eyre, wandering aimlessly in her institutional chamber, confides to the reader, “I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon.”
This is where I have landed, lately. The repetitiously polemical prayers of the internet (and indeed, they are prayers, for as Augustine said, “Your desire is your prayer…”) consist mostly of media-fed clockwork outrage, incessant indignation and unfettered hate, hate, hate offered to the gods of whatever ideology or agenda is currently spinning one’s individual little world. Cascades of rage drown out the small, uplifting reads we might find as we scroll endlessly, looking for something to “like” that meets our ever-sinking standards.
No one is saying anything new or surprising, and no one is listening, anyway. Society has become saturated and overstimulated, no longer able to believe that there is more at work in the universe than what we can see with our eyes or perceive in our twitterfied, hyperventilated upsettments.
Within me is a growing certainty that I must pay attention to what is unseen, direct my own energy into cooperating with that invisible and supernatural unknown by attending to God in prayer and meditation, by recalling that despite the dazzling whirl and vulgarity of the casino, God is running the tables, and the house always wins.
God is good and full of mercy, with plans for us — plans of fullness, not of harm. Increasingly I feel called to serve that reality, to quiet down and let the frenzied world turn its terrible ways while in the grips of a chaos magic that has been increasing in its scope for many decades.
It’s difficult to say something newish, something less predictable, to a world that really doesn’t care, is entrenched in its own enthrallments and can’t be bothered to look up, quiet down and think. Social media is destroying us; we think we are innocently killing time, but we are killing ourselves.
The psalms, this Lenten season, have given me an assignment of daily prayer, and I take it up willingly, particularly for all of us victims of social media:
For love of my brethren and friends
I say: Peace upon you.
For love of the house of the Lord
I will ask for your good (Ps 122:8-9).
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