Phill Sacre

Tag: twitter

  • The Social Dilemma: Why I’m not deleting my Facebook account (yet)

    The Social Dilemma: Why I’m not deleting my Facebook account (yet)

    In the last week, I’ve seen two friends announce they watched the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma and are deleting their social media accounts. I understand the sentiment. I’ve thought about deleting my social media accounts on several occasions! But I still haven’t quite been pushed over the edge just yet. The positives have always (just about) outweighed the negatives. So – was The Social Dilemma enough to convince me?

    In a word, no. Let me give a few reasons why I’m not going to be deleting my social media accounts yet.

    There was no new information

    A year or two ago, I watched a documentary on the BBC about social media. Almost every point made by The Social Dilemma had already been made in that documentary. In fact, for that reason I felt The Social Dilemma felt a little outdated already. It felt 3-4 years old, which is probably not surprising given that most of the people who were interviewed for it left the big social media companies a few years ago.

    This is not to say that their warnings do not apply today, but I do feel that social media companies have started to make changes. For example, I think Facebook has become aware of being a political echo chamber – lately I’ve seen more posts on my news feed which I disagree with. (Actually that’s why I blogged about hiding political memes).

    You can mitigate against some of the problems

    As I said, all of the issues raised by The Social Dilemma I was already aware of. In fact, it actually inspired me to created a couple of videos about smartphone addiction. This one below, and another one looking at a more Biblical angle.

    That video was recorded a year ago, and I think even since then things have changed: Facebook and Twitter are becoming more and more annoying. The ads are getting in the way more and more. It’s becoming less easy to simply connect with other people, which is its main selling point. In other words, these days I find myself much less tempted to use it.

    And for me personally, I found it really helpful to think about it from their perspective. When I knew that they were deliberately trying to get me to stay on their site for as long as possible, all the annoying things made sense. And I stopped giving into it so much… maybe it’s because I’m a contrarian, but that knowledge was very helpful.

    The problems were all human problems

    A long time ago, I was involved in an internet discussion forum for DJs. One day the owner of the forum basically packed up and decided to go on a year-long trip round the world. He didn’t let anyone know before he went, and the forum moderators didn’t have very much power to keep order. As you can imagine, things went a bit crazy – I remember people falling out, accusing each other of things, all that sort of thing. When he returned, after things settled down, the blame game started: was he to blame, for leaving the forum without giving appropriate power to the moderators? Or were the people to blame who’d actually done the things they shouldn’t have done?

    I argued then, as I would now, that – at the end of the day – circumstances do not cause people to do wrong. They may be a contributory factor. But we all face the choice of doing right or wrong – human beings have dignity and responsibility (as I argued last time).

    I think it’s exactly the same with social media. The fact that social media may be an echo chamber doesn’t mean that we have to hate people who have different views. That’s something which is not the fault of social media – even if social media exacerbates the problem, it doesn’t cause it. Social media has been designed to be addictive – but the weakness lies within human beings.

    And this is the key point: social media only has as much power as we give it. It doesn’t have to become all-consuming or divisive. It only will if we let it.

    There are still positives

    There are still a few positives to social media. It’s nice to be able to see photos of what other people have been up to, especially if they’re friends or family who don’t live nearby. I also appreciate the Facebook groups – I’m in a couple of groups which are really useful. And the nice thing about groups is, it doesn’t suffer so much from the algorithm problem – Facebook doesn’t hide posts which it thinks I will disagree with.

    I also find Twitter a helpful resource – if you use an app like Tweetdeck rather than the standard Twitter app, it won’t prioritise tweets it thinks you will like. You’ll just be able to see your “vanilla” feed, without promoted tweets etc. Twitter is still a really good resource to find articles and pieces which I wouldn’t see otherwise.

    So I think social media still has its uses, even if there are real issues with it to contend with.

    It’s important to be a witness

    As a Christian, I think it’s important to be salt and light in the world. Basically what this means is, I think it’s important for Christians to try and show the world the right way of doing things – however imperfectly. We need to try to love each other, even our enemies. I don’t think social media is so irredeemably broken at the moment that it cannot be used in the right way. I think Christians should use it, but try to use it in a right and godly way.

    For example: not calling someone names if they disagree with you or even are rude to you. Not getting into fights about trivial issues. Trying to seek the truth rather than post fake news.

    At the moment, I think it’s possible to use social media in a good and godly way. If it becomes impossible, I think that would be the moment to leave.

    It’s where people are

    The final thing I wanted to say is, it’s just where people are at the moment. A lot of people do spend a lot of their time online.

    As a Christian minister, I think it’s important to be with people where they are. That’s what Jesus did: he didn’t stay in the synagogues and preach there. He went into the towns and villages. His most famous sermon is the Sermon on the Mount – because it was preached outside! Where would the equivalent location be today? I don’t know, but I think social media would be part of it.

    My other site Understand the Bible started life as a YouTube channel. I wanted to make videos that would reach people where they were. These days I also upload videos to Facebook. Social media is actually a good platform for sharing the gospel – it allows a lot more people to see and interact with Christian content.

    A few weeks ago I read an article where someone was talking about the Reformation. They mentioned that the printing press was a key part of the Reformation. I think social media could be something foundational for a new, 21st-century reformation: Lord knows we need one! Social media means the gospel can get into people’s homes, onto every computer and smartphone. Who wouldn’t want that opportunity?

    As Paul says in Ephesians 5:

    Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.

  • Does social media stifle debate?

    Has it really come to this in our society? Has it really come to the point where we seem utterly unable to believe that someone can hold another opinion on a difficult issue without believing that they are a moral monster?

    It started out two or three years ago with same-sex marriage. The media loved to portray everyone who disagreed with the redefinition of marriage as a bigot, pure and simple. Real debate was stifled, because any argument for traditional marriage had to be ruled out a priori – because, you know, it’s bigoted.

    Then, more recently, a debate on abortion at Oxford University was shut down because a rather militant group of people (via Facebook) decided that they were going to cause trouble if the debate went ahead.

    And then we came to the general election. One of the things which has really got to me over the last few weeks is the way that the Tories have been constantly vilified and accused of more or less being morally bankrupt. Not just that, but if you believe most of what is put on Twitter, the only person who would vote for the Tories is someone who cares nothing for the poor, someone who essentially has no moral compass and deserves nothing but contempt by any right thinking person.

    Many people have spilled ink writing about the rights and wrongs of this – for example this article – so I will try not to rehash old ground.

    Instead, I think it is worth reflecting on just what it is that is making our society so hostile to opposing views. How has it suddenly become normal in our society, a society which prides itself on free speech, to demonise whole sections of people and even make them scared of speaking out? (Witness the phenomenon of the ‘shy Tory’). Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about politics, and as I’ve been considering I’ve been coming more and more round to the conservative way of thinking (material for a future blog post, perhaps). The thing is, I would actually genuinely hesitate before expressing that particular view on Twitter or Facebook, mainly because of the amount of hatred and bile spewed at the conservative party by what seems like the vast majority of Twitter (certainly I don’t recall seeing many pro-Tory posts – although perhaps that’s to do with the people I follow).

    It seems to me that social media, rather than encouraging debate, is actually stifling it. I’m not sure as to why that is, but I think there might be a few reasons:

    • I think Twitter and Facebook enable ‘herd mentality’ to kick in. It’s very hard to express a dissenting opinion when everyone around you is expressing a particular view. Especially when that view is portrayed as being crazy, immoral, ridiculous, and so on.
    • Twitter and (to a lesser extent) Facebook also make it very easy to find like minded people. The problem is, what you end up with is basically conversing with people who agree with you. You don’t have to converse with anyone you disagree with apart from the purposes of shouting abuse at them. OK, this is a caricature, but is it that far removed from the truth? I don’t really see much actual engagement on Twitter between those of different political persuasions, it’s simply people who already agree with each other slapping each other on the back. Rather than trying to understand where the ‘other side’ are coming from, it is simply assumed that they are wrong and acting out of selfish / immoral / absurd motives (etc). This is quite probably because of the following point.
    • The 140 character limit of Twitter makes it very hard to express much more than a soundbite. This is very unfortunate, because it seems that what spreads well in soundbites is usually a watered down version of the truth (i.e. one side of an argument) without any nuance or a chance for qualification.
    • Following on from this – I think misinformation spreads very quickly on Twitter. Over the past few months, I’ve seen graphs and statistics that say all sorts of different things about our country and economy. Some of them say that things have improved,  some of them say that things haven’t. Some of them portray the Tories in a positive light, some of them  don’t. I think a big part of the problem is the way you cut the data – the way you interpret it. (The old adage about lies, damned lies and statistics comes to mind). But what I think tends to happen is that the statistics / graphs which support the prevailing notion (i.e. that the Tories are evil) tend to get retweeted a lot, whereas the statistics and graphs which might show something different don’t get shared as much.

    A few months  ago I thought about the dark side of social media when it came to the Top Gear Patagonia Special. And the longer time goes on, I see more of this kind of thing going on. I’m wondering whether social media might actually be having a detrimental effect on our society in general.

    I don’t think that social media itself is a bad thing, but I do feel that the way it is set up – especially Twitter – makes it very easy to ignore other opinions and simply to convince oneself that one’s opinion is correct with all the accompanying self-righteousness. Although all this was and is possible without the help of social media, it simply exacerbates the issue.

    So if this is a problem, how do we solve it? I think one of the biggest problems with the stifling of debate is the lack of understanding and empathy for opposing views. It seems to me that social media would be a lot better if people took some time to seriously understand the view they were criticising before criticising it. If it could be understood that on some issues different views can be held with complete integrity, and those should be respected. Perhaps this is a simply unrealistic dream in this day and age – but I think as we see the effects of this stifling of debate play out more and more in society, perhaps people will realise that actually we need understanding rather than polarisation and demonisation.

  • Is Twitter making us dumb and angry?

    Every few years, it seems to be an unwritten rule that the newspapers have to have a scare about dumbing down, e.g. GCSE results now don’t mean as much as they used to back in the good old days. Now, whether they have a point or not I can’t say, but it does seem to me that a lot of it is alarmism: things aren’t really as bad as all that, the “good old days” were never that good, etc.

    That said, I have been thinking a bit about Twitter recently, and how it affects communication. Twitter, if you’ve never got into the craze (and have had your head buried under a rock for the past few years – in which case, how are you even reading this?!) is a social media service where you can send messages to your ‘followers’, people who subscribe to your updates, as long as the messages are 140 characters or less.

    In many respects this has been an absolute revolution – but, frankly, lots of people have written about it far more eloquently and intelligently than I ever could. What I’d like to look at is one aspect of Twitter usage which I’ve become more and more disturbed by over the past few months (and years – it’s been building for a long time).

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