Social Collapse

 

There are very few talks that I remember as vividly as one given by Bart Campolo at my church’s retreat in the mid-1990s. He is a gifted speaker, and his main point that day was that television was distorting our connection to reality and our ability to process our thoughts. Honed by his work in youth ministry and his own consumption of TV programming, he astutely pointed out that, while we tend to focus our judgment of TV on bad content (e.g. violence, sex, profanity), his criticism was the medium itself. TV, in his telling, subverts our need to connect to our feelings and to the world around us. It is literally make-believe, everyone on the screen is beautiful, and there are no boring scenes; none of this is how our actual lives are. And, the immersive nature of the medium is such that we become passive consumers; through visual and auditory cues, we are told when things will be heart-pounding or sweet or enraging or foreboding. The end result of all of this is that we become increasingly dissatisfied with the real world, and increasingly unable to articulate what we are actually thinking and feeling. 

This is consistent with the main point of the 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” by Neil Postman, which caught the front end of a TV-dominated era that has influenced not only entertainment but culture, community, and politics. To come back to my above point, it’s not that we consume trashy content; it’s that we’ve relegated ourselves to a platform for content that has rendered us passive, thrill-seeking, and escapist. 

You’re probably already where I’m going, which is that 30 years after I heard this talk and 40 years after that book came out, we are experiencing an extreme version of this phenomenon due to the prevalence of social media, which is a far more pervasive form of the TV medium that both Campolo and Postman lamented. On social, everyone is beautiful and everything is effortless. The irony of this arc is that social media is basically the natural extension of the boom in “reality TV” in the early 2000s, in which scripted shows with paid actors gave way to contrived competitions among regular people. And yet there is very little “real” about the reality TV we now consume through social media. 

We are in a bad place, and much of this can be traced to this root cause, first from TV and now from social. Low self-esteem comes from being bombarded with impossible body standards. We are facing a mental health epidemic because the ubiquity of content cannot help but leave us anxious. Even our eyesight and body posture are suffering from all the screen time. Most importantly, addiction to our screens has robbed us not only of social connection but in many cases of human touch, which is disastrous for our wellbeing. 

Most people who see this feel that we must take drastic action. Ban TikTok! Delay giving our kids phones as long as possible! Enforce rigid screen time limits! There is a place for these interventions, and I certainly respect the desperation behind them. But I fear these remedies only address the surface, and are hard to sustainably enact anyway. Just as we needed to take care once television became so ubiquitous, we need to take care now that social media is everywhere. We need to talk to our kids about the dangers, not just of the content but of the platform itself. We need to literally touch grass. We need to take long self-imposed breaks from our screens. Postman called it ”amusing ourselves to death,” and I don’t disagree that it is that serious.