Christchurch Parish News, June 2017
What does it mean to be a Christian in the digital age? Part 1
You can read the introduction to this short series here.
What’s the last thing you do at night and the first thing you do in the morning? If you’re under the age of 30 (and for many who are older), the answer is likely to be that you check your phone.
Even the expression shows how much and how quickly things have changed in our society over the last 10 years. Prior to the advent of smartphones (iPhones etc.) that are connected to high- speed internet, your mobile phone was fairly limited in its functionality. Most people would use them to make calls and send text messages. That was pretty much it. You would only check your phone to see if you had a voicemail or new text message.
But now, depending on your age and take-up of the new technology, ‘checking your phone’ means checking all sorts of things: scrolling through social media accounts such as Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, or even YouTube to see what photos and videos your friends and family and those you follow online have most recently posted; or seeing if you’ve had a last minute or a first thing work email that you need to respond to; or checking the news websites to see what’s happened in the world. After all, you’ve been asleep for six or seven hours and so much could have happened. You don’t want to miss out.
It’s not a one-way street either. We’re not just watching and reading content online. We’re also creating it: posting our photos to Instagram and Snapchat or our videos to YouTube; writing our opinions, briefly if it’s on Twitter with a 140 characters, or longer if it’s to a blog or a comment section of an online newspaper.
But no matter who is creating the content and consuming it, none of it would be possible without the basic technology that undergirds it that almost all of us already take for granted: the internet.
We can talk about when the internet was created, when the first domestic dial-up connection became available in the 1990s, and then later broadband, when high speed internet (super-fast broadband) was first rolled out – these have all been critical stages in the internet’s development, for sure. But it’s the advent of the smartphone and having high speed connectivity wherever you are that has been the real game-changer for many.
When the internet was created, it was the province of the military and academics. When the domestic dial-up began to be available in the mid-1990s, the connection was so crushingly slow that website designers were advised not to create webpages that weighed more than 28 kilobytes. But then, with the advent of high speed internet in the home, the size of the code (what’s under the bonnet that creates the pages and apps you see and use every day) ballooned to 2-3 megabytes per page. So about a 100 times bigger.
Until quite recently, using the internet when you were out and about with your smartphone was often a frustrating experience because the connection was a patchy 3G. But now, yes, even in Christchurch, we have high speed 4G and you can walk down the high street, video linking to someone living on the other side of the world and have a face to face conversation in realtime.
To give you a sense of the sheer quantity of content being produced and consumed: in the five minutes it’s taken you to read this article so far, there will have been about 1500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube worldwide. Not only that but about 37.5 million videos will have been watched as well. In the time it takes you to pause between reading these two letters A and B, another 125,000 video have been watched. There will also have been in the same second about 7000 tweets on Twitter and 55,000 searches on Google. You get the idea. A immense amount of content is being shared online.
It’s a new world for sure. But in this digital age, where we’re always online and the internet is at our fingertips wherever we are, and more and more of our lives are mediated via screens, what exactly is going on? And more specifically, amidst all of this, what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus Christ? I reckon that one of the key things that’s going on comes down to an issue of there being two competing narratives.
The first narrative is the one where you get to create yourself. Social media fits in with this very neatly. To illustrate this, let’s take the simple example of the selfie. When you post a selfie, you rarely post the first image taken. Instead you take multiple images and select your preferred photo in which you look your best. But then, you don’t proceed to posting it straight away. Instead, you tweak it. You edit the colour, change the filter and adjust the crop. Perhaps you’ll use an app like Facetune to make yourself look that bit better, especially if there’s an aspect of your face that you’re not quite happy about. Then, and only then, when you’ve done all this, do you post it online. In other words, you’ve posted something which shows you at your very best, how you’d like to be seen, that says and conveys all the things that you want the people viewing it to think about you. And if it doesn’t get enough Likes fast enough, then you change it and go through the whole process again.
Over time, the succession of these photos and videos, and all the associated comments, start to form a story. In fact, that’s exactly what three of the social media platforms actually call them: your Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook stories. They are stories which are true but only to a degree. They reflect you but a highly edited, carefully considered you. In the main, though there are notable and important exceptions, there is little room in our online mediated lives for vulnerability and weakness. We tend to hide those aspects of ourselves online. Instead, online is where we like to think we present our best selves. To use a film metaphor, online is where we share our edited highlights rather than our blooper reel.
In all of this, the overarching narrative of the internet is one where we get to create who we want to be. It’s our story and we, individually, are the central characters. The contrast with baptism and being a follower of Jesus Christ could not be greater.
So much of baptism is about identity: who we are and who we are called to be. This is where the crucial difference between the story shaped by our broader culture, of which the internet is a product, and the story of baptism lies. Sociologist Robert Bella calls it ‘expressive individualism’. The broader culture’s narrative is that life is about me getting to be really me, the authentic me, and my being able to express that in my life. If anything gets in the way, be it my upbringing, family, social conventions etc., then I’ve got to free myself of them and edit them out. In this story I’m the protagonist. I’m the hero.
But in baptism, the agency is completely different. If you think about it, at the very simplest level, you don’t baptise yourself. The infant doesn’t grab the scallop shell out of the priest’s hand and baptise him or herself with a squeal. Nor does the teenager wade into the sea off Southbourne beach yelling, ‘I baptise myself!’ No, the agency is not with the one who is being baptised but with God.
Likewise, the symbolism of baptism is one where you are not the protagonist of the story. As you are taken under the water, be it as the water is splashed on your head or as you are submerged in a baptismal bath, you are understood to be dying to your old self; and as you rise out of the water you rise to your new identity which is rooted not in you or your story but in Christ and His story. This is not an identity that you secure for yourself. It is an identity that you are given because it has been secured for you by Jesus.
In the baptism narrative there is no need to deny or hide our vulnerabilities or weaknesses, for we do not create ourselves. Nor do we redeem ourselves when we are unable to live up to our own expectations or of those of others. We are not in competition to look better, be smarter or more successful in whatever way that matters to us. For we are not in competition for God’s love. It’s not something that we have to persuade God to give us. God loves us freely and gives us this identity freely, no matter how we’ve messed things up. In other words, it’s a narrative of grace.
To return to the question, if the first thing you do in the morning or the last thing you do at night (and countless times during the rest of the day) is look at your screen of choice, how does it make you feel? One of the questions I ask those who attend the talks I give on this topic is: what kind of character traits, or more specifically virtues, does the internet cultivate? Oftentimes, people respond by saying that they frequently end up feeling dissatisfied, down, discouraged or angered when they have spent time online, especially when using social media. Not all the time, to be sure. There’s much that’s good about the internet and social media. But does the internet encourage us to become more or less loving, more or less joyful, more or less peaceful, more or less patient, kind, generous, faithful, gentle and self-controlled…?
In the digital age, creating our own narrative, crafting the carefully edited story of our lives, puts a huge strain on us. It’s one that we cannot ultimately bear. But on being received into the story of the Triune God, Father, Son & Holy Spirit, our Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, we find that the burden of having to create our own identities has been lifted and that by contrast we have been given life in all its fullness.
But this is so easy to forget. Which is why, whenever we reach for our screens, let’s hold fast to the knowledge that we are loved, held and cherished by God. Both online and off.