A longer perspective of religious traditions can offer significant insights into what seems to have become a cultural cul-de-sac of social media.
.jpg){kind=link}
Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism (see previous long entry) has led him to "stumble across this growing tension between social media and religion" which he details in his April 8 post. The real issue is not the existence of social media itself, but the manner in which it fragments and dissipates focus and attention --and attention is a common element to religious practices in many streams of faith or traditions, both Eastern and Western.
I noted previously that Newport pays attention to figures as diverse as Aristotle, Thoreau, and Abraham Lincoln, and acknowledges the depths of the discussion of focus and human flourishing, "but he avoids getting pulled off task." Well and good --but the relation between focus, attention, and human flourishing (becoming a better human being) is a very old concern with a long, long literature (to say the least!). Newport's book is not primarily addressed to those in any faith community or tradition. Those who are such a community, however, cannot fail to pick up the resonances of this discussion.
One might first point out that social media is hardly the first significant distraction to come around, and the idea that "social media might be accidentally undermining religion" needs perspective. Religious practices, whether or not reified into something that contemporary Westerners understand as a "religion," have been around a very long time. Social media is not yet quite 20 years old ("The Facebook," launched February 2004; Friendster 2002). The view that social media can or will quickly and significantly undermine practices going back thousands of years so could be superficial. Intellectual ideas of about what a religion is have changed, and practices have changed; but those practices have been severely challenged before and somehow persisted. Will runaway social media usage really accomplish what centuries of pogroms, persecutions, and cultural coopting have failed to do? Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris might be so lucky.
This observation does not dismiss Newport's question. That social media do in fact seek to capture, control, fragment, and dissipate users' attention is a feature, not a bug. They do that by design, as Newport showed and skewered brilliantly. This is why the great Zuck's "regrets" about fake news and hate speech ring so hollow: those who write and spread fake news and engage in hateful communication are using social media exactly as intended. Social media was meant for everyone to share, and do the trolls share! The idea that platform does not foster content is ideological sleight of hand, a fib to deny culpability. Much of the content of social media is nevertheless utter poison, and it might be even more threatening to many religious traditions than the fracturing of attention itself.
A longer perspective can offer significant insights into what seems to have become a cultural cul-de-sac.
Decades ago I was privileged to study with Diogenes Allen at Princeton Theological Seminary when he was in a very productive period of his life. An Oxford (Rhodes) scholar, he was a searching and provocative reader of texts classic and modern, and three books in particular have stuck with me: Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death and Works of Love, and Simone Weil's Forms of the Implicit Love of God (and her related "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God"). These are my sources for the following reflections.
The fragmentation of attention was brilliantly and lucidly addressed by Kierkegaard in 1849 in Sygdommen til Døden (The Sickness of Unto Death). SK was deeply enamoured of the Danish language, and thoroughly embedded in Danish history: the events of unsuccessful revolution of 1848 in Copenhagen "have been of world-historical significance and have overturned everything . . . . Every system has been exploded. In the course of a couple of months, the past has been ripped away from the present with such passion that it seems like a generation has gone by." (From The Point of View for My Work as an Author, written in 1848 and later published in 1859, also below). In other words, a world not unlike our own in many ways.
But when "the threads of intelligence broke," and when "everyone who has, in various ways, been a spokesman in the past has been reduced either to silence or to the embarrassment of being forced to purchase a brand-new suit of clothing," a new way forward could break open, and SK searched for language and forms of life for that new world. He found it in his word for despair, fortvivlelse, an for- intensification of tvivl (doubt or question); for+tvivlelse is both mega-doubt and raises the stakes: meta-doubt. In despair, such meta-doubt is to be of two minds: not only split apart from one's self, but split apart from God. An anti-Hegelian, SK saw an irresoluble polarity of temporal/eternal, freedom/necessity, consciousness/unconsciousness in human experience, which is fundamentally an experience of divided-ness or fragmentation.
SK rings the changing forms of fortvivlelse (despair) through these polarities. All humans experience despair or fragmentation; the depth is despair is to live unaware that one is in despair: the fragmentation that admits no fragmentation. This condition is universal, and the only way out of this condition is for the self to live "by relating itself to its own self, and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it." (English transl. by Lowrie, p. 147) . To be "grounded transparently" is to do the works of love, which is the Summary of the Law.
The person who truly admits, holds on to, and focuses this despair (fortvivlelse) will open oneself to the Reality of world (or creation) it its beauty, order, in service to others, in respect for practices that focuses this attention, and in friendship. These are, in Simone Weil's terms, the forms of the implicit love of God. God (the Power which posits us) seems absent, and we can only love (or focus upon) God through the forms of Reality by which God's presence is implicit and mediated. The "right use of school studies" develops a lower kind of attention, which is "extremely effective in increasing the power of attention that will be available at the time of prayer, on the condition that [studies] are carried out with a view to this purpose and this purpose alone." Weil writes, "the key to a Christian concept of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention." (Waiting for God, p. 105)
When I read Newport's Deep Work three years ago, I was very much struck by the sense in which deep work could be extremely effective training to the power of concentration and attention. (Deep work is "professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limits. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.") Deep work rightly undertaken can train a form of energy (a habitus) for prayer and focus upon the "meta:" Reality, God, Emptiness, Submission, Torah among other names in varied traditions. This is not really the "deep work" that Newport meant, who was writing at a different level for a different audience. The resonance is unavoidable for those who have ears to hear.
As a librarian, my work is collaborative and can sometimes feel trapped in the shallows, not the depths. My writing and focused reading helps me to return to the depths. Library service, at its best, is a soul-craft that provides a glimpse of the sacred trust of learners, teachers, and traditions as they undergo necessary and unavoidable change. That glimpse does not substitute depth for mere metrics of productivity. A librarian's deep work is not necessarily solitary, but does require clear boundaries for time with colleagues and time alone.
This sounds high-flown but it has direct, practical implications. During "crunch time," students do in fact limit digital social media. Project Information Literacy learned in 2011 (.pdf) that "students use a “less is more” approach to manage and control all of the IT devices and information systems available to them while they are in the library during the final weeks of the term." Further study (.pdf) has shown that they use a "hybrid approach to conducting research and finding information. " While this study needs to be updated --students in 2011 had a different experience of social media on smart phones than do students in 2019-- the PIL study suggests that at least the seeds are present for a successful critique and debunking of the casual "the more sharing, the better" slogan, beginning with high-stress times like the close of the semester.
Shifting focus away from the forms of despair that feast upon distraction, and towards purposeful existence, is always going to be a tough sell for many. As Annie Savoy says about Ebie Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh in Bull Durham, 'The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness." By contrast I know three young individuals who voluntarily went off social media this past year, because they wished to serious attention to learning surgical nursing, biochemistry, and vocal performance (music). In the words of one, "enough of the self-created drama." If that insight is possible for a few, it might be possible for just enough at a tipping point.
To return: does social media in fact undermine religion?
If by "religion" one means what one sees in an ordinary church, synagogue, or mosque on an ordinary sabbath, then on a superficial level the answer is yes. The great mass of those who lead lives of quiet desperation may never become aware of their own fragmentation or despair --and social media is intended to fragment, to snuff out any intimations that something is not right (almost in the sense of Neo's choice to accept the blue "normal" pill in The Matrix, further reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland's choice of potions).
If by "religion" one goes further not only into self-reflection and self-awareness, but into active contemplation of the order of the universe, then the answer is probably no. In that perspective, social media shrinks to a mere mosquito-buzz level of irritation, or worse, a poisoned well. Despair is a general condition of the human race, neither created nor extended by mere social media. But social media can be its tool.
Social media as a channel of despair will admit no alternative. It becomes reality; reality's fragmentation is both its content and its platform. No wonder the Silicon Valley elite will not allow their own children near it. Only true disruption (not mere "innovative disruption") will reveal fragmentation and despair for what it is --and disruption, "moving fast and breaking things" is what social media was originally all about. In the polarity of despair, its infinitude of disruption has become a finitude of being shared: a world in every way Zucked-up.