Social Media & the Approval AddictionNick Beasley - 25 Feb 2016

This post, originally published in 2014, is so relevant for today that we've decided to republish it for #ThrowbackThursday.

"WE LIVED ON FARMS, THEN WE LIVED IN CITIES, AND NOW WE'RE GOING TO LIVE ON THE INTERNET"

- THE SOCIAL NETWORK, 2010

This week saw the 10th anniversary of Facebook and the revelation that the ever popular social media platform is now used by 1/6 of the world’s population. 

Social media isn’t just a reality of the 21st century; it’s shaping people’s realities. 

At the beginning of 2013, when the population of the earth had surpassed 7 billion people, The Huffington Post reported that 163 billion tweets had been sent, 5 million photos were being uploaded to Instagram every 24 hours and Facebook’s 1 billion users have listened to over 210,000 years worth of music on the site. And all that was over 12 months ago. 

So The Social Network was right. Only now the tense has shifted; there isn’t any ‘going to’ anymore: 

We are living our lives on the Internet. 

If we don’t understand this new way of life, we can find ourselves lost in it. And in this newly digitized generation the greatest threat to our integrity, self-belief and our faith, is ourselves.

In John Ortberg’s The Life You’ve Always Wanted, he speaks of people’s “bondage to what others think of them”. This ‘approval addiction’ manifests itself in people’s desire to gain approval from others, regarding their appearance, opinions and personalities. It drives them to compare themselves to others, and compare their successes to those around them.

Over a decade since John Ortberg wrote those words, we find ourselves in a society where we, as approval addicts, can find a constant fix. We have the ability to trace, study and ‘Facebook stalk’ every hour of the day. We can read the thoughts of those we only know from a distance, and have the same done to us; we each become celebrities of our own walls and newsfeeds.

And it’s this place with great potential for self-esteem crushing that we so often try to find vindication.

For harm or for good? 

How many times have we ranked the worth of things we’ve said and done according to ‘likes’ or ‘Retweets’? How often have we judged the worth of others in the same way?

We need to remember how it tends to work online. We rarely present the lives we really live; but streamlined versions of ourselves; concentrated down to the good stuff. We only post photos where we look good, tag ourselves in places it looks like we’d be having fun and craft catchy phrases that look like they’ve rolled off the tongue. 

This is how it is for almost all of us. But what we forget what that actually means: if our own ‘presented lives’ aren’t true to ourselves, they have no power to alter our own self-perception. However, when others do the same; that snapshot of their life is all we get. And our false perception of others impacts the perceptions we have of ourselves.

“But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even judge myself… It is the Lord who judges me.”

1 Corinthians 4 v 3-4

Social media is a wonderful thing. We’ve found a way to connect with each other and society instantaneously. We can learn more, connect more and grow as people, every hour of the day. But as with most wonderful things, (fast cars, Big Macs, religion), we can use it wrongly and use it for harm.

We have to approach social media as we approach all things; with a heart for God.

If social media is shaping a generation, we have to take social media seriously. And this involves active participation. Learning how to function properly online is an important part of our Christian lives. As a church and as individuals it’s crucial to engage with the digital side of life. Social media can be a powerful, authentic tool for the mission of the church. And that means it’s our responsibility to understand it. 

That’s how we integrate ourselves into a generation, and help to lead a generation.

We just need to make sure we’re using it right.