To be honest, my relationship with social media and mobile technology is a suspicious one.
I’ve never owned an iPod or a tablet, a smartphone or even a CD player. I don’t have a Facebook and frankly I think Twitter a little silly. Instagram and Snapchat, so many apps and even the blogosphere: I really don’t know what to think of them, or whether they’re ultimately good things for us.
Maybe it’s ironic that I’m blogging for the Intercollegiate Review‘s Student Voices forum, then, and writing for a few other online outlets to boot; and to be honest again, it does strike me as strange that I have firmly planted a foot in a cyber-world that I am happy to ignore.
Is there a way to gauge the net effects of the ubiquitousness of social media and mobile technology on our culture? Probably not. If there were, I doubt the results would be negative overall.
Yet I can’t help but wonder whether our use of these things hasn’t turned from a firm reliance to a need and an obsession too easily indulged. I never watch TV unless the NBA Finals are on – and I’m not ready to talk about that disappointment just yet – but when I see another Verizon commercial praising the symbiosis between the most important moments of our lives and our manual gadgets, I will cry at how boldly consumerism lays claim to our most human moments. And I’ll cry at how easily our lives have been manipulated by those products.
Mobile technology and social media have usurped far too much of our time, attention and energy, and for some reason have flown under the religious radar of cultural-mores-that-are-detracting-from-our-cultivation-of-habits-and-mentalities-that-are-conducive-to-living- deep-lives-of-faith.
That’s not a good thing.