What is the purpose of social media?
Let me begin with my initial ideas:
Social media is addicting. Apparently, activity on your wall or blog causes a reaction similar to feeling affection, which therefore causes addiction (see this). And addiction to anything isn’t terribly good (quite the contrary, I’d argue).
Social media is inherently self-promoting. This is and the previous point are similar. As men, we can easily want to be more in the opinion of others, and social media can so cause self-centeredness, which is absolutely contrary to the way God wants us to live. Trevin wax makes this point here.
Social media is time consuming. To this I’m sure we can all testify first-hand. How long do you spend blogging, tweeting, or Facebooking? And what fruits do we bear? In Trevin’s post above, he writes that he needs to “take a step back and evaluate the spiritual effects (both good and bad)” of social media. Does the time we spend justify our use of it?
I see these three points primarily as results of using social media, and I make them without regard to [social media's] actual purposes. So, what is the purpose of social media? How would you reconcile these three points with social media’s real purposes?
And specifically, how would you reconcile these three points with a blog’s purpose? Facebook’s purpose? Twitter’s purpose?
Okay, I’m going to answer this in two parts. First, in this comment, I’m going to address the three concerns you raised. And then, in a new post, I’m going to answer the original question “What is the purpose of social media?”, and by extension, the question “What are the effects of social media on the Christian life?” So here we go.
The implication of the concerns you raised is that the use of social media is, if not inherently wrong, then is in general a bad idea. Now, I know that this is not what you’re saying, but that you are simply asking questions. But here are my responses to the concerns you raised.
I would argue that the reason why getting notifications on facebook causes a good feeling, or to say it more simply, makes one happy, is not just that it releases some chemical in the brain. To me, that is a reductionist, naturalistic worldview which degrades humans to being merely physical creatures–practically animals. I think that the reason why we like having people write on our wall/comment on our pictures/message us/[whatever else you can do on FB] is that we like having interaction with people. Receiving communication from our friends reminds us that we are loved and accepted and living in community with other people, which is how God designed us to live. So if someone is “addicted” to facebook, it may very well be that they are “addicted” to their friends. And in that case, the problem is not the social networking site (be it facebook, twitter, myspace, whatever else there is), but simply the person’s social maturity.
This, in my estimation, is the most serious and dangerous concern of the three. It is true that social networking sites, as well as blogs/websites, can be very conveniently used to make much of ourselves, and if we want to use these tools to God’s glory, we must be on guard against doing that. But my simple response would be that again, this is a heart problem, not a problem with the medium. Everything I touch is going to be susceptible for my use as a tool to self-glorification. But to say that social media is “inherently” self-promoting–in other words, to say that it is impossible to use social media in a way that glorifies God instead of self, I think that’s going too far. For examples to disprove such a statement, I would point to the use of Twitter by people such as Bob Kauflin and Josh Harris, who use Twitter mainly to point people to good resources/books/blogs out there; or organizations/ministries like Sovereign Grace or Desiring God or Ligonier that use Twitter to leak news about conferences and resources and such; or blogs by people like CJ Mahaney and The Gospel Coalition and many, many more that find their purpose in edifying Christians all around the world. So I don’t think it’s fair to say that the problem is with the social media. I think that once again the problem is with us.
This is, of course, the most practical of all the concerns you’ve raised thus far, and it is most likely the one thing that most people involved in social media need to address. But as with the other concerns, this concern simply calls for caution and discipline, not a total abandonment of social media. I’m going to address this more in my full-on post, so I’ll stop for now.