Love and hate for social media

I love Facebook and Instagram. I hate Facebook and Instagram. Sometimes I love and hate social media at the same time. I am sure I am not alone.

I signed up for Facebook a very long time ago. In the early days, it did seem fun and a good tool to connect with people, especially long-lost friends and people who were overseas. I regularly shared photos of my family or my garden and had friends, people I knew in real life, interact with these photos. It seemed to do what it promised: to connect people.

Instagram was a more recent addition. It seemed to have surpassed Facebook in popularity and there is something compelling about videos. A bit too compelling.

Over time, logging into social media on my computer or checking using the apps on my phone has become a habit. If I’m bored or have a few minutes, it is so easy to open the apps and be presented with something new. Not new in the sense of life-changing or even encouraging really. More new in the sense of a new meme, a new joke, a new distraction.

Social media has changed. I am connected with many friends on both platforms, but few of them ever post anything at all. It is not a place for social connection any longer. It is generally a place for content consumption. Where does this content come from? Well, companies trying to sell you something, and influencers who want to be famous and make money. People who don’t care for you or connect with you at all, to whom you are another number, another statistic.

I rarely finish a session on Facebook or Instagram feeling that that time was worthwhile. At best, it was a few laughs, maybe some memes to share. At worse, it is depressing. And that’s before we consider the impact this has on our concentration and mental health.

In my more lucid moments, I have deleted the apps, logged out of the sites on my computer, and even installed software to prevent me accessing social media. I managed to go without social media for some months altogether a while back. To be honest, I didn’t really miss it at all. And I noticed how much time I had. So much time. It was confronting to realise that social media has the capacity to take up whatever available time we have. I needed to think of new ways to spend the time, which for me is mainly reading. And there are so many advantages that reading has over social media! On top of this, I felt more present in conversations with my family and didn’t feel the pull of my phone quite so much.

I am back using social media and trying to do so more sparingly. It’s a battle. It’s like an addiction to some degree; you want to check what’s there, even if you know it is not worth it and will likely damage you rather than build you up.

Christians should make the most of the time, for the days are evil. Social media, by any gauge, is not generally a good use of time. Not that we need to be productive 24/7, but it is hard to make a solid case for using it extensively in the way that it currently exists. When we stand before Jesus, and we are asked what we did with the precious limited time we had, are cat videos and memes a good answer? Or even quotes from theologians and snippets of historical facts?

I don’t have all the answers when it comes to social media, but I am trying to learn and work on my compulsion to check it. Can it be used well for the kingdom of God? I am sure it can, like any technological advance can be. But it also presents us with the great danger of wasted time and a lack of focus.

We need to be thoughtful with how we use our time. We need to work on self-control, which is a fruit of the Spirit, rather than immediately scrolling when we have five minutes. We need to find ways to properly rest that appreciate God and his creation and not only the screen in front of us.

You can choose how to spend your time. Don’t be enslaved to the algorithm and companies fighting for your attention. We need to be more thoughtful than that.