May a Christian Participate on the Internet as it is?

May a Christian Participate on the Internet as it is?

By Old ‘Gus

I know I am a hypocrite, typing and transmitting this question in such a manner, and likely to continue to engage on the internet going forward, yet I feel I need to ask the question: May a Christian Participate on the Internet as it is?

              I have observed and used this tool for well over a year, and am both over awed and disgusted by it. My primary concern is that it is anti-incarnational. My secondary concern is what social media does to us in our flesh. It is addicting, distorts our sense of time, and is set up to be innately divisive. Thirdly, it makes me ask the question What Spirit does it foster? Finally, I wonder if there was an inflection point where it could have been something more than it is?

The internet is a secondary source, a simulation of the world around us. The sun is not as bright as a screen and my friend in the flesh is more real than an avatar. Its use promotes “slactivism.” We post, or more likely re-post, links and memes and other such things, and feel like we’ve done a good deed. We have become people who believe we have done something, but have done nothing. There is a hungry man and we make a meme about it; does a man live on memes alone? There is sojourner in need, a caged child even, and we make sure we’ve said the right thing about her, does that set the captives free? A hashtag without real world results is dead. All actions on the internet are indirect actions, but it seems we have forgotten it, and in so doing we have constructed a Platonic cave for ourselves.

              A good case can be made that the President is addicted to twitter along with 420,000,000 other people. The refresh button constantly promises a fresh chance at salvation, another hit of headlines and hot takes.

The internet offers a hit of immediacy, that’s its stock and trade. Everything goes down the memory hole, because we value the newest of news; presentism is the unnamed dogma of the age. Imagine how easy it would be to keep a population passive if you kept it chasing new outrage after new outrage.

And that need for newness, it fosters division. Everyone has to have an opinion on a thing, before they can process its actual meaning or implications, and so, we borrow meaning from others who are as ill-informed as us, but a little wittier. And soon enough, grasping for moorings, we cluster together into partisan groups, noting how ill-informed the other side is, and often they are, even as we recycle our own instant answers to questions we have never pondered, and never will, because there is a picture of a frog that explains it enough that we can move to the next new thing our little doped up brains have latched onto.

And, all of this vexes the spirit, and needs to be discerned. Like Paul, we need to ask which side of a great spiritual battle is buoyed up by this technology and our participation in it? Does it promote: fornication, vicious immorality, uncontrolled debauchery, the worship of idols, belief in magic, bouts of drunkenness, nights of carousing, and the like? Or worse still: instances of irreconcilable hatred, strife, resentment, outbursts of rage, mercenary ambition, dissensions, separation into divisive cliques, and grudging envy of the neighbor’s success?

Or does its use promote: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faith, gentleness, and self-control?

There was a time when people like my host, Chris, were foolish enough to believed the internet would bring about a second Republic of Letters, his blogsite focused on bringing about that reality has since been scooped up by a company selling alternatives to power point. Was such a possibility wishful thinking from the start, or has something changed on the internet? Was it the popularization of the internet (after all the Republic of Letters was a rather elitist institution), or Google’s method of sorting the internet, or the advent of facebook (or SixDegrees or Myspace?), or the limit of 140 characters on twitter (after all, hot takes get a lot hotter when they are so short), or the creation of the smartphone (sending messages out while doing number two does degrade discourse in a very particular way)—what made the internet what it is today? Was it inevitable? How and should a Christian use it?