Monday Morning Quarterback – Encouraging God’s people to be responsible, encouraging and uplifting in their use of social media.
One common problem with conflicted congregations (a dynamic I can almost always count on being present) is what I call the “shrinking universe” phenomenon. It is a simple concept, really. When the only people we choose to listen to are the ones we agree with and who already think like we do, our “reality” becomes smaller and smaller and becomes more and more biased. If I stand squarely on one side of a conflict and I surround myself with others on that same side, and we continue to have our little “pep rallies” where we spout off the same version of the “facts” over and over again, that version eventually becomes the only version I can accept. My universe has shrunken down to accommodate my bias.
Social media not only has its own version of this phenomena, it is philosophically (and brilliantly) designed to further it. You have already experienced this if you are a Facebook user. Using some of the most sophisticated analytical tools the marketing world has ever known, Facebook has become remarkably intuitive, reading all your preferences (from the pages you like to the friends you message…from the type of computer you use to the cookies you may permit it to see in your cache…from your demographic info to your career info). Facebook is constantly analyzing all of that information about you and then it is deciding for you which friends’ posts to show you and which friends’ posts to hide from your newsfeed. So, if you have “liked” Fox news and you tend to message your conservative friends mostly and your posts are full of links to conservative blogs, etc., guess what posts Facebook is going to show you? Guess what ads show up on your feed? Your “universe” has just shrunken down more and more to meet your bias.
And it’s not just Facebook which does this. Pretty much every social media vehicle has similar bents built in to it. Ever wonder how LinkedIn knows who you should know? If you think about it, this is actually one of the things we love about social media. It has made it easier than ever before to find other people interested in the same things you are interested in. It is by design. In one sense, it creates community. But in another sense altogether, it only deepens the trenches already dug between factions in our community…because all of us have shrunk our universe down to meet our biases.
But it is not just social media which does this. Search engines do it too. Google and Bing and whatever other search engine you prefer are all reading you just like your social media site is reading you. When you type in a search request, your search engine is accumulating all the possible answers and is then sorting it and giving you FIRST the answers it has determined you are looking for. If you and I each key the identical search query into Google, we will get very different results…because Google reads us as very different people, deserving of very different answers. It may ultimately be the same answers, but they are in an entirely different order for each of us. So, even the instruments we are counting on for the truth are giving us bias according to what they think we want, i.e., a version of the truth which fits our demographics. Sounds a lot like our current news syndicates, right?
So, how can we, as Christ followers, prove ourselves to be the kind of “listeners” and compassionate conversationalists and lovers of ALL people which Jesus was? How do we accomplish that when our online world is filtering out so much of what we really should be listening to and understanding? We have to be intentional about getting outside our world. We must open our hearts and open our minds to genuinely seek out opposing viewpoints in order to truly understand not just the contentions, but the interests and the human beings behind those contentions. We must get outside our shrinking universe and walk among those with other perspectives. We must begin seeing the world through others’ eyes and feeling the world through others’ experiences.
You have to admit…it’s what Jesus did.
One response to “Get Outside Your World”
You nailed it! This has been much on my mind recently, especially since my church began using “The City” as a means to get the congregation to “connect”. As you point out, the connections trend to like-minded, age oriented / experience level groupings.
Thanks for the thoughtful insight.