social media

Michael Woolf 1-04-2024

Supporters of the lawsuit stand in front of the Berlin Regional Court before the start of the hearing of Environmental Action Germany's landmark lawsuit against the U.S. internet giant Meta (Facebook, Instagram) at the Berlin Regional Court, Nov. 21, 2023. Credit: Carsten Koall/dpa via Reuters Connect.

In October of last year, 33 states sued Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, alleging that the company has “concealed the ways in which these Platforms exploit and manipulate its most vulnerable consumers: teenagers and children.” The lawsuit further alleges that the company “repeatedly mislead the public about the substantial dangers of its Social Media Platforms.” The most recent lawsuits make it clear that churches, that are operating large numbers of social media accounts, must do some soul-searching about whether they should stay on platforms that are causing harm to young people.

Rose Marie Berger 12-26-2022
An illustration of a person on a purple backdrop. She wears a tired expression and is surrounded by twisting arrows weaving around her and pointing in all directions.

yokunen / iStock

HAVE YOU EVER had one of those perfect moments?

My wife and I sat on a bench at the farmers market with a plate of steaming hot tamales before us and a bag of crisp fennel bulbs, Pink Lady apples, and fresh spinach at our feet. The air smelled of salt and cooking oil. A deep yellow and iridescent gold light wrapped around us. Every noise fell away in a holy hush. We met, however fleeting, the “still point of the turning world” described by poet T.S. Eliot. Held and beheld.

To be honest, I usually miss these moments. Though I try (religiously) to keep custody of my mind and attention, the world we live in now beeps, dings, buzzes, and updates 24/7. It’s hard for God to break in. Perhaps this description of digital architecture’s pointed intrusions into our one beautiful life is too minimalist. Most days, I’m holding my breath against the crushing dynamics of digital onrush and knowledge outflow. I miss the still points between the crest and lip of that wave.

Tyler Huckabee 11-15-2022

Elon Musk speaks during a conversation with legendary game designer Todd Howard (not pictured) at the E3 gaming convention in Los Angeles, Calif., June 13, 2019. REUTERS/Mike Blake

We must reject the idea that wealth has any bearing on a person’s true acumen, potential, or value. This is harder than we might think and takes some deliberate work. Frankly, it might be harder and more important to rethink our ideas around poverty, recognizing that a person’s lack of money doesn’t tell you anything about the value of who they are, what they’re capable of, or what they have to offer the world.

Emily Beth Hill 9-30-2022
Side profile of two hands resting on an open laptop; the screen shows an image resembling surveillance footage of a congregation taken from the rear of the church

Illustration by Anson Chan

I WAS SITTING in a large auditorium full of market researchers. A speaker suggested that, by selling wrinkle cream, we were helping to make the world a better place because women would feel better about themselves. I looked around the room, thinking, “Is everyone buying into this? Do people really think this is true, or do they see that it’s just a corporate pep talk?”

I had worked in the world of international market research for nearly 10 years. Though there were a few moments like this one when something just didn’t feel right, in many ways I still didn’t see the issues I see so clearly now — marketing techniques are the air we breathe.

I eventually left my work in marketing to pursue a master’s in social justice and a doctorate in theological ethics. I began to investigate how marketing practices negatively impact how we live as human beings and how we think about marketing in the church. In contemporary society, we tend to view marketing techniques as neutral tools that can be applied in different contexts — whether for businesses, nonprofit fundraising, or church communication. But can we adapt tools that have been developed in the context of capitalistic profit maximization to the mission of the church? Are there fundamental differences in how the church views and relates to human beings?

I had worked in the world of international market research for nearly 10 years. Though there were a few moments like this one when something just didn’t feel right, in many ways I still didn’t see the issues I see so clearly now—marketing techniques are the air we breathe.

Mitchell Atencio 4-26-2022

A screenshot of the author's tweet from March 2020, one month before writing his first piece for Sojourners, and one year before being hired as assistant news editor. Mitchell Atencio/Sojourners

Twitter is a strange thing — if it’s any singular thing at all. If it does come to an end, I hope we’ll look back reflectively and carefully, learning from what we got right, what we got wrong, and growing into the future.

Illustration of a man standing on top of a hill looking off into the sunset

We Are / Getty Images

I WROTE MY first “Eyes and Ears” column in January 1987 when I was a Sojourners staff editor. Over the ensuing years, I’ve changed from Protestant to Catholic, from full-time journalist to full-time teacher, and from city mouse to country mouse. I’ve been married to Polly Duncan Collum and helped raise four children. Through all that, I’ve kept this column going, but now I’m pulling the plug to make way for whatever’s next.

In my first column, I set out a twofold purpose for this space. I intended to track the merger of politics and popular culture that began in earnest with the 1980 election of a movie star president. I noted then that our public life was largely being reduced to an “ephemeral community of shared media experience,” by which, at the time, I meant mostly Hollywood movies and various televised spectacles.

By the time we elected a reality TV star as president, the convergence of politics and popular culture was already long complete, except that, in a world of microtargeted messaging, there is no longer even much “shared media experience” from which to forge a community.

My second rationale for starting the column, however, has held up a little better. I noted way back then that, in both politics and popular culture and in the intellectual netherworld of think tanks and commentary journalism, the very definitions of terms such as “America,” “democracy,” and “Christianity” were up for grabs. In 1987, I called this a “war of ideas” and it continues with a vengeance, though often degenerating into an emotional war of identities.

However, “stuff happens.” And in these 35 years, two big things have happened that exploded many of my expectations and drastically altered the cultural landscape.

Amar D. Peterman 11-15-2021

Although it is hard to imagine a world without Facebook, we must look critically at the implications of its widespread use and the powerful companies that control these platforms — and us. Whether by making election interference easier, selling people’s data, fostering social division by populating feeds with malice, greed, and dissension, social media provides an opportune venue for users to live into our depraved human condition. The consequences of this, however, are not contained in the digital world.

Greg Williams 5-03-2021

UNTIL RECENTLY, I had a boss who kept CNN on all day in her office. I work in communications, so this made sense, but it made me wonder: How can we best consume the news? Does the news make us anxious and divide us? Or does it serve as a way to learn about the world and how we can better love and serve our neighbors? Though the evidence is mixed (we rarely have simple answers in life), Jeffrey Bilbro’s verdict on news consumption in Reading the Times is mostly negative.

Bilbro’s analysis suggests that modern media—understood broadly to include everything from newspapers to social media—divides our attention among trivia, binds us to the daily rather than allowing attention to the eternal, and diverts us from local, embodied concerns to national ones outside our scope of influence. His argument ranges broadly, integrating thinkers from Thoreau and Auerbach to the more modern Wendell Berry and Charles Taylor. The reader feels like they are in a college classroom, in a good way, with a professor who isn’t afraid to synthesize broadly to make their point.

A mob of Trump supporters and insurrectionists storm the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Photo by Toyfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

LIKE THE FRENCH police officer in Casablanca who was “shocked, shocked” to find gambling in Rick’s Cafe, in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, social media companies were “shocked” to discover violent anti-Semitic and white nationalist agitators lurking in plain sight on their platforms. With their usual earnest hypocrisy, the companies took action, banning tens of thousands of groups and individuals from the social media universe. Facebook and YouTube suspended Donald Trump’s accounts. Twitter permanently banned him.

Never mind that in the preceding days and weeks those same social media platforms hosted the planning for Jan. 6, or that for years they have profited from a business model that ignores truth and promotes outrage. But when some of their more unruly customers got off the leash and started threatening the people who write antitrust laws, Facebook, Google, and Twitter suddenly became tribunes of civility.

Of course, such monumental hypocrisy from Big Tech gave many Republican politicians the opportunity to change the subject from their own possible complicity in the insurrection to what they claim is suppression of free speech by the liberals in Silicon Valley. To this, clever liberals have replied that the First Amendment only applies to government, not to private corporations.

Da’Shawn Mosley 1-04-2021
Portrait of a young person who is made up of pixels.

IF ASKED “What era would you time travel to if you could?” many young Black and brown and Indigenous people would answer in a flash, “None of them.” Why? We’re too aware of the past and what it means for us today—we tweet about the results of American slavery and can break news of the latest injustice to emerge from centuries-long hatred of nonwhite skin faster than MSNBC. We feel the negative effects of history enough each day to not want to go back there.

But maybe we should. If all we see of ourselves on TV and social media is us sick, oppressed, or dead, what other understanding of ourselves do we miss? How can we remember that we are greater than the damage done—that our history holds more than that and so might our present?

Ruby Sales, founder and director of the SpiritHouse Project, helps young people invested in faith and social justice see themselves through the lens of their divine wealth and boundless potential rather than through eyes dimmed by media and versions of history shaped by white supremacy. Sales, who by age 17 was a Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee member registering people to vote in her home state of Alabama, has a Master of Divinity degree from the Episcopal Divinity School and is a preacher, speaker, and intergenerational mentor on racial, economic, and social justice. I spoke with her in December by phone.      —Da’Shawn Mosley

Da’Shawn Mosley: I watched a YouTube video of you speaking in 2015 at St. Albans Episcopal Church in D.C. and was struck by what you said about today’s youth: that the most recent generations have incredible insight but haven’t lived enough to have hindsight.

Ruby Sales: Now that I’m working with young folks in my fellowship program and have had some time to weigh how things have changed from the ’90s to the 2000s, I think young people lack insight also. When you have been raised in a technological age, when history is no longer lived experience but is created on social media and reproduced through technology, I think that long-term memory is affected, as well as the ability to empathize and connect with human suffering. There is a difference between being able to theorize about human suffering and being able to feel it. All of these are challenges faced by generations raised in a technocracy—the decimation of history, of who we are as a people.

Danny Duncan Collum 10-26-2020

THE PAST DECADE has seen an endless trickle of negative stories about social media—data breaches, Russian bots, cyberbullying, digital radicalization, etc.—so by now almost everyone knows that the amusement and convenience those platforms offer come with a downside. But now a new Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, is here to tell us one big thing: It’s worse than we thought. In fact, it’s worse than we could have possibly imagined.

In the film this alarm is raised by many of the very people who helped create the systems they now decry. We’re talking about the guy who invented the “Like” button for Facebook, the guy who designed the recommendation engine for YouTube, the fellow who invented the infinite scroll. One after another these mostly white, mostly male characters come on camera to tell us how badly their proudest accomplishments have gone awry.

The big problem these folks warn us about is that our smartphones constantly collect data (what we buy, what music we play, where we are, who we talk to, etc., ad nauseam) and that data is used to fuel a system of targeted alerts, notifications, and recommendations designed to keep us on a site for as long as possible and deliver us to advertisers who also have that data about us.

Dennis J. Kang 6-18-2020

Motives are clearly important in the Bible.

Illustration by Michael George Haddad

IN LESS THAN two weeks in late 2019, three heads of government (in Iraq, Lebanon, and Bolivia) agreed to step down under pressure from mass protests. Earlier last year, long-standing military dictators in Sudan and Algeria were forced from power following popular uprisings.

On their own, these events are remarkable. What makes them truly extraordinary is that they came amid a worldwide protest wave from Hong Kong to Manipur to Chile that has toppled governments, led to new social policies, and challenged basic economic structures.

Authoritarian regimes are not protesters’ only targets. In Chile, considered an oasis of stability in South America, protests triggered by a hike in subway fares have grown into popular demands for an end to corruption and economic inequality. And the global climate movement has used walkouts, sit-ins, and civil disobedience to dramatize the need for urgent action. In each case, popular dissatisfaction with traditional institutional approaches has encouraged a turn to extra-institutional (and at times extra-legal) resistance.

Surprisingly, this proliferation of people-power movements has taken place amid a period of declining effectiveness for movements. While around 70 percent of major nonviolent movements in the 1990s succeeded, only around 30 percent did so from 2010 to 2017. Protests have been easier to start but more difficult to resolve. So, have the movements of 2019 broken these trends?

We link the declining rates of effectiveness and their potential reversal to the emergence of parallel global networks of protesters and repressive governments (both dictatorships and democracies), who use increasing access to global information to rapidly learn from one another. This means that ideas, symbols, and tactics that both help movements succeed and successfully suppress them spread quickly from their origins to other struggles. In the past, waves of successful protests often lasted years. What we are seeing now—and are likely to see more of in the future—are short, sharp waves of successful protests followed by short waves of failures.

Kayla Lattimore 4-26-2019

Van Jones in his new docuseries The Redemption Project. Photo courtesy Grace Hill Media

His latest docuseries, CNN’s The Redemption Project, Van Jones a look at what restorative justice and healing looking like within our criminal system, bringing offenders face to face with those affected by their violent crimes in hopes of promoting dialogue and healing.

THIS YEAR MARKS the 50th anniversary of the invention of the internet. One day in October 1969, scientists successfully transmitted data from a campus computer at UCLA to a computer at Stanford. Twenty years later, the infrastructure for the World Wide Web went into operation, and the creation of our whole digital universe quickly followed.

Lately, there have been plenty of days that have convinced me that the invention of the internet is one of the worst things that has happened since our first human parents decided that a little bit of “knowledge of good and evil” couldn’t possibly hurt anything.

John Thornton Jr. 12-03-2018

Giles Lambert / Unsplash

We hope that the suffering we’ve seen on our social media feeds will provide consensus. We convince ourselves that this moment, this tragedy, this picture of suffering will provide the common denominator that will spark people’s compassion. How can anyone look at the picture of a child running from tear gas and not feel compassion? By calling to mind these images in our sermons, we hope to open people up to hearing about different political solutions to the problem at hand. If anything, we’ll all agree that we must do something.

Abby Olcese 7-30-2018

Image via Eighth Grade IMDb page 

Most of us who managed to survive middle school regard it as the most awkward time in our lives, when we cared deeply about how others see us, but were just as deeply unsure of how we saw ourselves. Eighth Grade uses that to tell a story about perception, one which applies to adults as much as it does to 13-year-olds. Burnham’s film explores how we want to be perceived by others, the harsh ways we perceive ourselves, and the way we’re perceived by those who see us fully, and love us unconditionally.

Kion You 4-04-2018

“Efficiency” and “productivity” are concepts that have reached so far out of the weekly 9 to 5 that they have become normalized standards in everything we do. Just scrolling on the internet reveals hundreds of messages on how to “life hack” and optimize our daily workflow, using Silicon Valley’s constant technology outputs to crank up our daily efficiency bit by bit.

Image via Flickr

For Augustine and his followers, attention was a rare and valuable experience, perhaps even more than for us since they associated it with the divine. One might expect that as a result they should have simply dismissed distraction. But they didn’t.

Matthew Gindin 11-06-2017

Image via Tero Vesalainen/Shutterstock

@JesusofNaz316 has a funny-sad-outraged quality. He sometimes uses the platform for irony or jokes, but more frequently for protest — sometimes against general injustice, but more often against the hypocrisy of Christians. His account, which has more than 16,000 followers, has been active since 2010. He is followed by progressive clergy like Diana Butler Bass and Rachel Held Evens and rabbis Danya Ruttenberg and Jonah Geffen, along with theologians and pastors from across denominations.