Social Media and Meaninglessness - Asking the Right Questions

Originally posted on Facebook - May 16, 2011

The latest issue of the United Church Observer features a cover story on social media and its role in worship, spirituality, and salvation (Kevin Spurgaitis - "Alone Together"). It's one in a long line of such examinations that have, from their inception, left me bewildered and tired. I would find myself asking, "What does it matter?" What's the big deal?

This latest article ultimately, after stating both sides of the "controversy" in the strongest possible terms (which, frankly, borders on exaggeration) comes to the conclusion that what we are facing is a change in form and not of content. Actually, I take that back. The article lays all of the groundwork for that conclusion, then ultimately fails to conclude at all.

I think I've finally figured out what the big deal is. My epiphany came earlier today as I was making a photocopy of an old United Church of Canada resource pamphlet (Patricia Wells - "Welcome to the United Church of Canada: A Newcomer's Introduction to A New Creed", ca 1980). Wells writes on page 2 of the pamphlet: "The loneliness of modern life has become a cliche..."

"Ah, modern life," I thought to myself as I warmed up the copier. "How lonely it was." You see, I am not living a modern life. As a person who grew up in the last gasps of the Cold War and came of age after the events of Tiananmen Square and the Gulf War, I am living a decidedly post-modern life. "The modern world" made certain promises - which it failed to uphold. Technology will solve our problems, it said. Democracy is fair and just, it said. There is one best way to do things and progress is revealing it to us, it said. The ongoing collapse of modernity is leaving a different world in its wake, and I am a citizen of post-modernity. The post-modern world is still defining itself, but it is characterized by an emphasis on pluralism and a distrust of metanarratives - stories that tell us who we are and how we fit in, and which often serve to 'colonize' or disenfranchise us.

Henri Nouwen, in 1972's The Wounded Healer, analyzed the situation of what he called "Nuclear Man" - the human being who has the potential and the capacity to destroy all of creation and all of history in an instant. Nouwen proposed that the primary affliction of ministers and the church in the time of "nuclear man" was loneliness. He said that, in the face of annihilation of all that we know, we are overcome with a sense of powerlessness and isolation.

I believe that Nouwen was in fact analyzing the colllapse of self-image of the modern person. The moderns perceived themselves as participating in a greater narrative that would one day come to fruition. In the face of ultimate destruction, and the apparent willingness of prominent individuals to instigate it, this great narrative became flimsy indeed. The succeeding decades would see even greater assaults on that self-image, as progress began to be revealed as something for us to aspire to, rather than an historical inevitability.

It must be said that loneliness still abounds. It will always be a challenge for our communities and our churches, to identify those who are feeling isolated, insignificant, or invisible and find gentle and affirming ways to come alongside them in encouragement and friendship. But, by and large, the primary affliction of the post-modern person is NOT loneliness.

This is the eye-opener I had earlier today. This is why all of the fuss over social media has left me so bewildered. And, I believe this is why the Observer journalist failed to really draw any conclusion at all. The concern about social media as a means of community and redemption comes from a late-modernist point of view - a point of view that tells us that the primary affliction is loneliness and the role of the church is thus to be a community that gives people a social location from which to derive an identity.

"How does online media give a person an adequate social identity?" the late-modern interpreter asks. "How does it help them cope with the loss of self resulting from the collapse of modernism?"

Well, those of us who became ourselves in the wake of that collapse are NOT looking for a social identity. The end of modernism didn't take away our sense of self. Rather, it gave us one. In our world, loneliness (while still a reality) is a matter of PERSONAL, not SOCIETAL concern. Our societal concerns are different. We are looking for meaning in a world with no solid reference points. We are looking for direction in a world with no external reality. The end of the world (through nuclear holocaust, ecological collapse, or astronomical disaster) is something to be combated - but its prospect does not fill us with existential dread. My faith tells me that if I die, humanity goes on; if humanity dies, the globe goes on; if the globe dies, life nevertheless goes on, elsewhere.

Our primary concern is not loneliness and belonging, but emptiness and meaning. In other words, asking whether those who use social media are finding a "proper" sense of belonging is simply to ask the wrong question.

Post-moderns are not looking for belonging. We know where and if we belong.

The question becomes, "Is social media a valid site for finding meaning and direction in a post-modern world?"

The answer to this question is a resounding yes.