The Courage to Be Happy

Not too long ago, in a quest to answer a question about lyrics in a Ben Rector song or find the end of the internet—whichever came first—I stumbled across a review of Rector’s latest album. The gist of the review was, His music seems pretty happy, which is surprising given the state of the world.

That sentiment is pretty common in popular culture. The review is in a relatively minor website, by no means a strong editorial force or significant cultural shaper. However, I think that is what a lot of people are thinking.

“How can I be happy when there is so much wrong with the world?”

There is war in Ukraine, abject poverty is horrible, it feels like the culture has gone crazy, my email inbox fills up faster than I can deal with it. The deficit is huge, there are issues with the environment, inflation is insane, the stock market it down.

Seriously, why can anyone be happy?

The Erasure of Distance

This sentiment of warranted unhappiness because of distant problems is a peculiarly modern issue.

One of the blessings of modern telecommunication is that it erases distance.

I can call someone on the other side of the world in a second and have a clear communication with them. I can also talk to the person sitting in the cube next to me using the same tool. In fact, I can hold a teleconference and have a discussion with half a dozen people that are thousands of miles away. Grandparents can speak to their grandchildren live, with video, and even watch in real time distant family events like baptisms, plays, birthdays, etc. This would seem miraculous just a few decades ago.

But the erasure of distance is also one of the curses of modernity.

Every problem in the world is now an immediate concern. I can get live pictures of people bleeding out in the street in Ukraine. I can see children starving to death on another continent. Flooding a world away pops up in my news feed with a higher frequency and realism than the family next door who just got a cancer diagnosis.

There is no separation. There is no local community. Every global problem is blasted into my pocket begging me to do something about it.

I don’t believe there is any more evil in the world than there was a hundred years ago. However, we can be much more aware of all sorts of evil, with vivid depictions, and demands for immediate action.

The Feeling of Futility

The demand for action is what makes the experience the most miserable.

When there is a car crash and we are the first on the scene we can provide first aid, call the ambulance, and hold someone’s hand as they weep over their lost child.

When there is a flood in the next county over, we can go and muck out someone’s living room, provide a bed for a neighbor, or get meals ready for disaster relief workers.

Truly local problems provide real ways that we can do something. We can take a casserole to the family who just lost a loved one or whose matriarch had surgery. There is something meaningful.

All we can do when we see the horrors of the world while scrolling through our phones is send a small donation, repost something to “raise awareness,” and feel a little bad by proxy.

The inability to really fix the big problems of the world leads to a feeling of futility.

The feeling of futility can lead to a sense of despair, which causes people to wonder why anyone can be happy when there is so much misery in the world.

The Courage to Be Happy

It takes courage to be happy in the face of the constant deluge of negative information we receive. “If it bleeds, it leads,” is the motto of all forms of news media. We have to find ways of coping with the overwhelming flood of information.

One way of responding to persistent negativity is what comedian Bill Bailey humorously demonstrates through the “Not Too Bad” approach, with the additional caveat, “All Things Considered.” As he describes it, this is the process of dialing down expectations to a reasonable level so that things are really not as bad as they could be.

Frankly, that’s the way I generally approach the issue. First, I try to limit my consumption of bad news. Second, I dial down expectations and try to remember that things aren’t really as bad as they could be. Living in the Midwest, I am frequently reminded that I am not alone in my approach.

But that’s not a particularly good way to live life. This sort of pessimism leaves one consistently expecting the other shoe to drop. It’s like the sword of Damocles hanging over your head. Things will probably be worse in a few weeks, so enjoy the moderate misery of the day.

It takes courage to be happy. It takes internal strength to shut off the flood of sadness from the world and say “Thank you” to the God of the universe who created everything from nothing, instilled the created order with wonder, and gives us breath every single moment. It takes stubborn, persistent, relentless effort to remember that things are not only “not too bad,” but that they are, really, pretty darn good most of the time.

Sometimes its good to take a moment to count your blessings, push off the negativity, and take a moment just to be grateful for the inherent goodness of the world. Given my own sin and depravity, things are much better than they ought to be. Most of the time, if I’m really honest, things are pretty darn good.

Stop Reading the News - A Review

There are thousands of companies and people that have you on their mind right now.

Maybe not you in particular, but they are thinking about a category of people that you belong to. They want your attention. They want to have you read their article see the advertisements on their pages and get hooked on their product.

Sometimes we act as if manufacturing drama for the news is a recent phenomenon. Jeffrey Bilbro helps debunk that in his book, Reading the Times. He goes back to Henry David Thoreau’s concern that newspapers of that day were exaggerating claims, inflaming situations for the sake of sales, and disrupting people’s ability to see the integrity of the world. The issue, though, goes back before that to pamphleteering after the invention of moveable type for the printing press, which drastically lowered the entry cost for authors and publishers. It’s a long-term problem, but it remains a real one.

Rolf Dobelli recognizes the way most people take in media as a significant problem and recommends that, as the title of his little book suggests, we Stop Reading the News. This book is, as the subtitle claims, “A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life.”

Dobelli is a popular author of airport books, like The Art of Thinking Clearly. His aim is not to draw people into some mysterious appreciation for only high-brow literature and a contemplative way of life. Rather, he is someone who has likely benefited significantly from attention in various forms of media (especially for the sales of his books), but understands that the way we process the news is bad for our minds.

The ironic setup for this volume is significant to its message and humorous. Dobelli opens the book describing his taking the opportunity to speak to a room full of journalists at the Guardian in 2013 about another book. However, he had also just written a blog post about avoiding consuming the news. In the room filled with people whose livelihood depended on people consuming the news, he was asked to further explain his position. He did. The newspaper employees found something worthwhile in his explanation, subsequently publishing some of his comments. This, in turn, led to the book, Stop Reading the News.

Summary

According to Dobelli, he has nearly entirely avoided consuming the news since 2010. One of the most significant exceptions was when he briefly got infatuated with American presidential politics around 2016. However, he quickly realized that it was a trap and returned to his more careful media consumption habits.

Despite what the media publishers may tell you, it is entirely possible to go through life without reading or watching their content. Dobelli estimates that the average person likely encounters about 20,000 items of “news” per year. He encourages a thought experiment: How many of those news articles have led to meaningful decision in your life that you would not have otherwise have made?

Looking back over the past year, I have to argue that Dobelli is largely correct. The news has not changed my mind, caused me to do something radically different, or really improved my life in any significant way. I may have encountered a few books that I otherwise would not have, but there has been little of significance. For Dobelli, the most significant difference the news could have made is when he would have known his flight was cancelled due to the Icelandic volcano eruption had he read the news. That would have saved a few hours of his life.

The news is largely irrelevant. Not just irrelevant to our daily lives, but actually totally insignificant. Dobelli points out the none of the daily newspapers in the world covered the invention of the first internet browser, which is arguably one of the most significant inventions since the plane. There were other stories of human and political interest on that day, but none of those items were really as significant in a historical sense as the web browser.

The news also encourages us to worry beyond our sphere of influence. It is tragic that there is genocide going on in a distant place, but our understanding every detail of the ongoing drama does not benefit me or the victims of unrest. In fact, when all is said and done, it is highly likely that much of the information distributed as “news” will be determined to be incorrect. Additionally, the news lacks the ability to accurately explain why things are happening, which is, in large part, what people who follow the news faithfully are not experts on issues they have not studied through longer articles and books (despite their confidence on social media). The net result of following the news closely is a false confidence in one’s own expertise and a more unsettled mind.

Another significant point that Dobelli makes is that the average person spends about 90 minutes a day reading this news. This means that about 1 month of the year is invested in reading or watching material that really won’t matter. Avoiding the news opens up worlds of possibility for deeper engagement through books, better conversations, and simply being a better observer of the world around. Imagine adding a month back into every year for rest or more productive purposes.

Conclusion

Stop Reading the News is a short book, about 146 pages long in a gift-sized format. It is about the right size to read on a medium length flight. It is filled with arguments for avoiding the news and ways to get by without reading the news. Dobelli’s point is not that we should be oblivious to the world, but that other media are a better way to really understand what is happening. He also notes that most stories of real import will be brought to your attention in daily conversation, even if you avoid the rapid-fire approach to the news.

This is not a must-read book, but Dobelli’s approach is compelling and the book is an easy read. This is the sort of volume that would be useful in a high school or college course on media literacy as a companion to the course. It is the sort of book that might be worth conveniently leaving at the home of a relative who is consumed by the news and has been transformed by the tone of the news. Personal application of the avoidance of news (and likely social media) might be a beneficial practice that would be worth experimenting with for many of us.

Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life

By Dobelli, Rolf

Buy on Amazon

My Tech-Wise Life - A Review

It’s one thing to argue that a plan like the one Andy Crouch outlines in Tech-Wise Family would work. It’s another thing entirely to find out how the people who participated in the plan felt about it. The 2020 book, My Tech-Wise Life, which was co-authored by Amy Crouch (Andy’s daughter) and Andy Crouch provides a portal into one teenager’s thoughts on her family’s approach to technology.

Amy Crouch is a student at Cornell University. As she describes herself in this book, she is not an exceptional being in the ways that our world often describes it. She is not a social media influencer with her own cable TV show, she has not won Olympic Gold, she has not developed a new technology that will end malaria in the world. However, at the age of 19, she did complete a manuscript for this volume. This is someone who may not be extraordinary in the conventional sense, but is the sort of person that I’d like to hear from about how a method of navigating the distractions of our tech-saturated world can come through and be the sort of college freshman that can write a good book.

This is a short book, but a helpful one for this particular moment. In eight chapters, Amy explains why her family’s conscious, tech-minimal lifestyle was a good thing. Each chapter is accompanied by a letter of response from Andy Crouch, Amy’s father. In Chapter One, Amy begins by demonstrating how social media can make us feel inadequate through comparison. A casual photo highlights our imperfections, which can make our image-infatuated minds dwell on negative self-perceptions. The answer that Amy provides is not to revel in self-love and post more ugly pictures on purpose, but to recognize the limitations of technology, keep tech in check, and focus on real life relationships. In the second chapter the topic is distraction. Anyone who writes knows how easy it is to get sucked into the cycle of clicking through social media platforms, email, and anything but the task at hand. Those who get notifications will find their phones constantly buzzing, drawing them away from essential tasks. The result is a harried life of distraction and unproductivity, which if started at a young age can set up patterns that undermine a teen’s future. Amy’s answer is to take control, limit apps, take media fasts, and keep the main things the main thing. This is enabled by a family structure than supports, encourages, and, when necessary, enforces such discipline.

Chapter Three wrestles with the question of connection and isolation. She discusses strategies to use technologies to connect rather than isolate. This begins by recognizing how easy it is for our portable entertainment devices to keep us isolated and treasure the connection. Social media is a fine garnish, but our goal should be a life off-grid. The secret to getting there is recognition of which has the greater value. In the fourth chapter, the topic shifts to the problem of secrets, privacy, and the digital age. Amy’s emphasis in this chapter is the problem of porn, which is distorting self-perceptions, expectations about sex, and relationships. Additionally, she talks about how the prospect of secrecy or anonymity can enable negative behaviors. Amy recognizes the good of privacy, but also that it is a limited good, so that having parents who can help when you’ve been sucked into binge watching a fairly harmless, but not-particularly-valuable show can provide some direct feedback.

Chapter Five deals with the issue of lying online. This has been encouraged, in some cases, because of the age limits of apps like Facebook, so that 11-year-olds would claim to be 13 in order to get access. Now the realization that a million identities and faux accomplishments are only a few clicks away. The message here is that it isn’t worth it, your real friends will know the truth, so you are burning bridges by presenting a false front online. The sixth chapter tackles the topic of using technology to avoid boredom. Here Amy channels some of the wisdom of her father (the culture maker) to argue that boredom is a good thing and the source of creativity and greater community.

The topic opens in several earlier chapters, but Chapter Seven explores the issue of technologies replacing sleep time, especially among teens (who need more than most adults). The stats are inarguable. 24/7 access to phones and computers is taking away from the rest that kids (and adults) need to live healthy, cognitively balanced lives. Amy’s solution is to put boundaries on phones, keep them out of the bedroom, and practice Sabbath where minimal technology is available to distract from other activities. The final chapter is an exhortation to live in hope. Basically, we need not acquiesce to the negative influences of technology. We can, in fact, take control and have a more positive experience if we take control, set limits, and live in communities that encourage healthy limits to technology.

I commend both Andy Crouch’s book, The Tech-Wise Family, and the combined effort with his daughter, Amy, My Tech-Wise Life, to both individuals and families. My Tech-Wise Life is obviously marketed toward teens, but I found it to be refreshing and helpful in many ways. It serves to undermine the argument, which I have heard some parents make, that limiting access to technology is going to “make my kid angry for living like we’re Amish.” Amy shows that when the whole family tries to live a tech-wise life it can make for a much better experience.

This book is very important in the attention economy because it shows (rather than states) the possibility and promise of limitations to technology. Amy encourages asking why one should use a particular technology or platform, not merely how to get access to it. Though the applications will change faster and faster, the principals are the same.

If you are a parent, read The Tech-Wise Family and this book, too. If you are a youth pastor, buy copies to distribute to your students. If you are a pastor, read this book, buy copies to have on hand when you have families come in for counseling due to results of stress that a tech-harried life will cause. This book does not answer all questions or make detailed theological arguments, but it provides a way forward for one of the most pressing questions of our day.

My Tech-Wise Life: Growing Up and Making Choices in a World of Devices

By Crouch, Amy, Crouch, Andy

Buy on Amazon

NOTE: I made the decision to refer to Amy by her first name due to the fact that this was co-authored by her father, to simplify the language. Since there are distinct divisions between her work and her father’s the first name seemed the simplest way to make the differentiation.

Reading the Times - A Review

Most local newspapers are dying. The little paper in my city has been reduced to high school sports, complaints about the nearby nuclear plant, classified ads, and the occasional social gossip. More and more newspapers are shifting to a model of reprinting what comes through on some subscription service. This has had the effect of trivializing the news, so that local stories about small-scale, but important deeds like a teen giving her father CPR or a child finding the foundation of an old historical building while exploring the back woods disappear. In their place we get news about a smaller and smaller set of less and less real people who happen to have a large following on social media, their own TV show, and might have moderate talent in some other area of life. We end up knowing more about a rich, beautiful, spoiled person whom we will never meet than we do about our neighbor down the block.

The media by which we take in the news of the day affects the trivialization of the world, though it does not mandate it. Many people get their news from social media, which means that it tends to be ideologically slanted toward opinions shared with one’s friends. Since one of the basic presuppositions of our society is that if you associate with someone you agree with them, a bubble of reality begins to form. And, since the art of disagreeing temperately on social media is difficult to learn, opposing ideas are often avoiding or ignored rather than engaged and questioned. Comments are either strongly affirming or attacking the opinion under consideration, because to say “yes, but” or “maybe this, yet not that” is a needle that few can thread from a keyboard.

But it is our behaviors that trivialize the news. We share articles with misleading headlines, sometimes without having read the body. We look for opinions that excoriate our outgroup. The algorithm feeds our human behavior and continues to provide the material for which we have developed a taste. And we must be clear that our taste has been developed through our own actions, or, at least, through our own failures to resist the tendency of the news medium to trivialize our view of the world.

What can we do about it?

Jeffrey Bilbro’s book, Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, provides both an apt diagnosis of the problem and some particularly helpful steps toward alleviating it. The result is a succinct, clearly-written book that is accessible to the layperson.

Bilbro’s diagnosis is not particularly innovative. He is channeling the energy of Wendell Berry, Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman, and Thoreau in arguing that the way news is presented is not good for the human condition. In application, Bilbro’s solutions are much more reliant on Berry and Thoreau (whom Bilbro has written about previously) than the other two thinkers. In any case, innovation is not what is needed, but intelligibility and digestibility.

The core of the problem, as Bilbro presents it, is not necessarily the technology or the content of the news, but rather that too much of what we get that passes as news has very little to do with our lives, even though it is designed to rattle our cage. What we get angry or excited about often has little to do with what God is concerned about:

“Perhaps we need to conduct an emotional audit and consider which issues or news items cause us to become angry, outraged, or excited: Are we grieving over what grieves God and rejoicing over what brings him joy? Or have we become emotionally invested in trivia while growing apathetic about matters of real import?”

Bilbro recognizes that a big part of the problem is the way we read the news. As a result, the fix is to change ourselves and what we value. This is a book that is timely and well suited for those looking for an off-ramp from the highway of partisan politics, misanthropy, and emotional turmoil that often goes with the news.

After a brief introduction, in which Bilbro explains that his purpose is to help us understand how to use the news to love our neighbor better, the book is divided into three parts with three chapters each. Part One deals with attention, Part Two with time, and Part Three with community. The pattern of each part is to present the modern problem in the first chapter, put out a somewhat abstract better condition in the second chapter, and then provide some realistic practices that can help transition between the two. This pattern of problem, better vision, and help to get there makes this book a novel contribution.

Bilbro does not abstain from social media, nor does he recommend that for his readers, but he provides a means to put social media use in its place. He doesn’t recommend disconnecting from news media, but being more thoughtful of who we read, when, and how. The book presents a realistic vision of living in a world that demands our participation, but threatens us through our participation at the same time.

Much of Bilbro’s writing has had a localist bent. Like his hero, Wendell Berry, he has invested a great deal of thought in how to live in this place, right now. Modernity tends to flatten the world (a la Friedman) and create a tyranny of the eternal immediate present. Bilbro points to living better with an eternal viewpoint and a local scope, which is just the opposite of the way the news pushes us to have a global scope with an immediate viewpoint. This book won’t solve all of everyone’s problems, but it is another piece in a puzzle of dealing with the malaise of modernity.

In addition to being helpful and well-written, for those engaged in the study of modernity, this book ties a lot of pieces together. The footnotes are a roadmap to a wide range of resources for deeper study and consideration. They are also a trap for an individual’s book budget. I had to read the book again (a pleasure) before writing this review because I got sidetracked for several weeks following the leads that Bilbro laid out in his notes. Several mysterious packages showed up on the porch in the interim, which I had to explain to my wife, which was local news enough around here.

Buy the book because it is good and useful. Beware that it is going to make you stop, think, and probably even change the way you look at a few things.

Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News

By Bilbro, Jeffrey

Buy on Amazon

NOTE: I received an advanced reader copy from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.

Media Intake, Praiseworthiness, and Fear in a Pandemic

Toward the end of his theologically rich exhortation to the Philippians, Paul penned these important words to the church in Philippi that have been given as a gift to us a couple of millennia later:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. (Phil 4:8)

When Paul wrote these words he was in prison (Phil 1:7), likely in Rome, and certainly feeling the pressure of his captivity and uncertain fate (Phil 4:12–14). He was writing to a church in a culturally hostile situation, facing an unknown future, with their leader facing potential execution.

Paul was writing to a group of people who had every reason to dwell on everything that is wrong with the world and run through a million hypothetical futures as they waited for decisions from others or news from distant parts of the Roman world.

In other words, this is a great example of God inspiring a human author to write a message that would be applicable to humans in every age of this world, and especially in our current time.

“Always On” Information

One of the miracles of our age is that we have all the information in the world available at our fingertips at every moment of the day.

To quote Adrian Monk, “It’s a gift and a curse.”

The news streams in constantly on multiple channels and the talking heads on those channels have to find a way to fill those hours of time in a way that will keep people tuned in and keep the advertisers spending millions of dollars.

This is a recipe for stress, worry, and maybe even panic.

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Pillars of Creation. Public Domain. https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/052/01GF423GBQSK6ANC89NTFJW8VM

It also provides opportunity for confusion as networks look for different opinions, the situation changes, and people look at the issue from different angles. When news anchors and talk show hosts—who usually know nothing about the issue they are discussing—riff for an extended period about things they are ignorant of, a lot of unfounded opinion has a way of making its way into people’s homes and can be interpreted as fact.

Non-experts battle experts for airtime. People seek positions that support their biases. Meanwhile we are desperately curious, stuck at home with little diversion, and hopeful for something that shows an end is insight.

It may be that we need to rethink our media absorption strategy.

Look for the Durable and Good

If the COVID-19 shutdown teaches us one lesson, I hope it is that we should spend our time thinking about true, honorable, pure, and excellent things.

Paul’s admonition to the congregations in Philippi is good advice for us all at all times in our media saturated age, but especially so when we our normal occupations are not available.

If you find yourself scrolling through social media and reading your tenth COVID-19 article for the day, then put down your phone, turn off your computer, and pick up a good book. If you recognize that you are watching the fourth hour of your favorite network’s coverage of this issue, with little new information other than different perspectives on the body count, then it’s time to turn the TV off and head toward Scripture.

As Neil Postman astutely noted in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, information takes the form that it is presented in. Television is, by definition, a transient medium that you have to experience in real time. Websites demand new traffic, which requires updated content with new numbers, slightly different perspectives, and combative arguments. Headlines are pitched with exaggerations, unfair generalizations, and misrepresentations in them to get you to click or stay tuned to bring the numbers up.

Look for something that is durable and good.

When your life is over, there is very little chance you will look back on the hours of cable news you read in these days and think they helped you grow spiritually. There is little chance that one more human-interest story from the crisis will really have made you a better person.

However, memorizing a passage of Scripture, reading another book of the Bible, studying an edifying book, picking up the work of literature you’ve been putting off, or doing something with your family will all be worthwhile.

Find a way to use this time for something that will have a lasting positive effect.

A Range of Options and Need for Discipline

Everything about the internet isn’t bad. It’s great that many knowledge workers can continue to do their jobs remotely. It’s a wonderful thing that we can connect with friends, families, and neighbors through instant communication. There are millions of valuable resources that are available for free (or a minimal charge) right now. We just need to be disciplined enough to put the candy (i.e., infotainment about the pandemic) down to pick up solid things.

We have a range of options, we just need to exercise them.

For example, I previously released a list of resources for the week leading up to Resurrection Sunday that would be helpful as a distraction in this time. Some of them can be ordered quickly. Others can be found online.

There are sermons from sound pastors available online for you to watch or listen to. Be discerning, but there is a lot of good material out there. Pick something that will expand your knowledge.

Conference lectures, academic presentations, and other instructional content has flooded the internet. Now is your chance to learn about Astrophysics, Classical Theism, or a million other topics.

We typically talk about starting a Bible reading plan at the beginning of the year, but now would be a good time to kick off. The most durable thing to think about is the eternal Word of God; consider investing some time into your Bible knowledge.

The challenge for us is not a lack of information, but a lack of discipline in focusing on the things worth learning. It’s important that we make the best use of our time, focus on spiritual disciplines, and avoid media that leads us into sinful worry and despair.

Our interests may differ, but the mandate from Paul is clear to focus on durable things that are excellent, praiseworthy, and commendable.

Social Media Justice and the Gospel

One of the common complaints against Christianity—what Tim Keller calls defeater beliefs—is that a good God…a loving God…would not judge sin and wouldn’t punish it if he did. He would just wipe it away and forgive it without judgment. We are taught by culture not to like violence, so we like to believe that a just God would also be non-violent.

Miroslav Volf, a theologian at Yale and a Croatian who had personal experience with the gross injustices of ethnic cleansing and genocide in former Yugoslavia argues that a God who punishes evil through judgment is necessary to keep people from seeking revenge:

If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make a final end to violence––that God would not be worthy of worship. . . . The only means of prohibiting all recourse to violence by ourselves is to insist that violence is legitimate only when it comes from God. . . . My thesis that the practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many . . . in the West . . . [But] it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human non-violence [results from the belief in] God’s refusal to judge. In a sun-scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die . . . [with] other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.

Our belief in a God who violently judges sin is necessary to restrain our hearts from desiring immediate and exorbitant revenge on the people that seek to do us harm. This is why Habakkuk calls for the judgment of the Lord in chapter 2 of his short book, rather than trying to settle all of the scores with his own hands.

In fact, in the history of Christianity, some of the worst evils that have been perpetrated in the name of Christ have been caused by people not trusting into God’s justice, but trying to bring about their own version of justice in their own time.

Social Media Justice

As Christians living in a world that celebrates injustice, often presenting it under the cloak of goodness or true justice, we find ourselves given a tool to announce our disapproval of everything bad. Thus, we think, we can stand against real injustice, even if it only via posts or tweets.

This is the mentality of the social media warrior. In fact, in our age, the digital assaults on people’s reputations that are perpetrated in the name of injustice are not much different that murder. The goal of many social media warriors is to destroy the life of their victims, but without the shred of mercy that actually killing them would entail.

An example of this is the recent brouhaha over the interaction between the Native American activist Nathan Phillips and a boy from a parochial school. That case itself has turned into a Rorschach test for your political position, so I will leave that unending debate over who was right (if anyone) in that situation to others.

However, what we should not miss is that there was an instantaneous urge to crush, smash, and destroy by those that hated the look on the boy’s face in the initially miscaptioned photo. To be clear, the opposite reaction could have been obtained from the other side if an activist wearing a charged political slogan had been caught in a pose that could have been represented as disgust, smarminess, or disrespect of one of the political right’s favored populations. The problem is not left vs. right, it is the urge to destroy.

And there were calls for destruction. Based on questionable interpretations of the event, which were driven largely by an inflammatory caption on a photo posted by a bot Twitter account run out of Brazil, people who consider themselves good and just and consistent in their pursuit of justice were calling for assault and even execution of the child in the photo. There were dozens of physical threats made against the school itself. All of this in the name of justice. Again, when the tables are turned, there are voices on the right that are just as nasty in their pursuit of justice.

This is exactly the sort of “justice” that Habakkuk is warning against: Justice that is really unjust because it is brought about in our way by our hands, instead of according to God’s judgment.

Conclusion

I believe in a God of judgment because it is the clear expectation of the authors of the Old and New Testaments. The need for a just God of judgment reinforces my belief in the God described by the Bible. The rise of the social media warrior with his virulent, destructive cruelty in the name of justice reminds me why Christianity must be true, else we have no hope.

We need a just God who will make the wrong things right. That is part of the gospel. Just as is the fact that salvation is available for all who believe in accept the power of the atonement to cover our sins, and put faith only in that for our final redemption. God is just. Our attempts to force justice in this world will bring about injustice. Thank God that he sent Christ to keep those who receive him, who believe in his name, from bearing the deserved wrath for our sins on our own shoulders. Thank God for being a God who is both just and gracious at the same time.

The Fake Web is Ruining the Internet

Something is amiss in the futuristic, digital wonderland that is the internet.

Among the most obvious problems are the incessant arguments including those caused by trolls and those perpetuated by sea lions. Add that to the sheer magnitude of bots online, and we have a real problem that can lead to misery, confusion, and misdirection away from facts.

The possible paradise of the internet is turning out to be a myth. The democratization of information has made it nearly possible to discern what is true.

Marketplace Distortion

Consider the validity of marketplace ratings. While there are examples of faux reviews that are exceedingly humorous, like the ones for the Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer on Amazon, fake reviews make buying decisions harder. And that’s not the way it is supposed to work.

The ideal of online reviews is for people who have used the product to honestly review them. However, anyone who has tried to sort through the reviews on products in a major online marketplace will know that amid the real, honest reviews are dozens that appear to be made up. These often are very high or very low ratings (depending on whether the company or their competitor funded the reviewers) and include gratuitous typos, insufficient information, and information designed to mislead. So, a product may have hundreds of reviews, but the real ones with important criticism may have been diluted by fake reviews.

The prevalence of fake reviews in the online marketplace makes using reviews nearly worthless sometimes. Add that to the ability for sellers to revise listings of old products to newer ones, while bringing along their reviews, and you have a recipe for unhelpful confusion.

Another trend that is unhelpful with the democratization of information is the volume of websites that seem to indicate they are dedicated to product reviews, but which are really dedicated to trying to acquire revenue through affiliate traffic. For example, do an internet search on “best gifts for a 10-year-old boy, you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. Someone trying to get suggestions for Christmas or birthday may want a blogger’s suggestions that their kids liked, but may only be able to find suggestions in click-through format designed to rake in money from another online marketplace.

Sometimes these offerings are helpful, but they accomplish the opposite of the intended purpose. When someone does a search online for creative suggestions, they are usually looking for something off the beaten path. However, these dozens of “product review” or “product suggestion” websites tend to all “recommend” the same dozen or so products, none of which they have any real knowledge of. (Full disclosure: I use affiliate links at the bottom of my book reviews and sometimes get a little money from them, but that is secondary to the actual review.)

The reality of the internet is turning out to be something less than the promise.

The Web Is Mostly Fake

According to a recent article from New York Magazine, we’ve passed the point where, by some measures, more than half of internet traffic is fake. Given that the next video you watch or next widget you buy may be recommended based on the programmed habits of a bot, this matters significantly. For those, like me, who spend time creating real content online—especially those who depend of traffic from YouTube or other traffic sites—that distortion can be disheartening and financially debilitating.

Because traffic generates traffic as we all chase the next cool thing, this fake traffic is distorting our culture. Is someone’s video really viral, or did they create or finance a bot army to give them clicks, help them trend, and push a somewhat novel but largely inane product into everyone’s feeds? The world may never know.

Given that a fair amount of news reporting—both traditional media and various internet outlets—is now mind-numbing reporting about trends on social media, the power of faking on the internet may have significant social implications. Is anyone really mad about the latest controversy? Or, was some minor infraction by a local official magnified by thousands of bots financed by someone who is either making money off of the clicks or gaining power by fracturing society? This is a powerful question that I don’t have an easy answer to.

One Proposed Solution

I do think, however, that we have the potential to curb some of the worst excesses in our own control by using self-control and changing our habits.

Perhaps the best solution to the problem is to use the internet in an old-fashioned way, with sustained patronage, long time relationships, and word of mouth recommendations. Major branded websites for news and information will likely remain significant, but to some extent we need to rely more on pseudo-social connections rather than search algorithms.

Used by CC 2.0 License. Photo by londonista_londonist.

For example, as a blogger well after the heyday of blogging, I think we need to bring back the blogroll. If someone likes my website, there is a decent chance that they will like the blogs I like, so I can let them know what and who I follow. That also means that I am vouching that I’ve watched/read enough of the content to know that it is real and not bot-generated.

In a world of depersonalized identities, we need to reorient toward personal connections, even if it is only virtually. The possibilities for deception are still higher, but bots are generally identifiable through their patterns of activity, real people are both more predictable and more erratic.

Conclusion

Much of the internet has become, for all intents and purposes, worthless. People are fake. Reviews are fake. Facts are fake. As we try to live life in a virtual age, taking advantage of the real benefits of the internet, we need to begin to reestablish habits that will make our experiences online more benefit than curse.

Amusing Ourselves to Death - A Review

Neil Postman’s classic book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Show Business, is an assessment of the shifts in Western culture since the advent of modern communication technologies. This is the sort of book that was prophetic in its day and, although somewhat dated, still communicates significant warnings to readers now.

Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985, during the Reagan presidency. It certainly does not escape Postman’s notice that the ascendency of an actor to the highest political office supports his point that entertainment has become the central purpose of American culture, though that fact is more a capstone illustration of the book’s greater point than the central argument of concern.

What Postman notes, however, is worth paying attention to. His central premise is that the medium is the metaphor. This is an intentional deviation from Marshall McLuhan’s famous slogan that the medium is the message.

Postman’s clarification is helpful, since it separates the content of the message from vehicle that carries the message. In other words, the facts of the news are the same (if written well), but the secondary signals created by the means that the news is transmitted also shape the reception of the news.

For example, Postman notes that prior to the invention of the telegraph, most newspapers focused almost exclusively on local news. The telegraph sped up the spread of national and international news, so that information could be had within minutes rather than days or weeks. The change was not wrought overnight, but the shift of concern from local issues to global ones has completely overtaken us today. Notably, it is much easier for me to find out about the personal lives of political leaders across the globe than to find out what the local city council is talking about.

Not only has news changed, but education has changed. Instead of doing the long, hard work of training minds, much of our educational methodology has shifted to entertainment. Postman notes that Sesame Street is a prime example of this, though certainly neither the worst nor the only platform that does this. According to Postman, whatever good is done by teaching through entertainment is undermined as it forms the learning human to expect education to be exciting. Thus, the endurance to learn and slog through difficult tasks has been diminished by the medium that is very effective in achieving short term gains.

It would be easy to claim that Postman was merely clutching at pearls, if the evidence did not point overwhelmingly toward the aggravation of the problems he identifies.

The point is not that technology is bad, but that technology is most effective if it is used in a particular manner. As a result, it is most commonly used in its most suitable manner, which shapes the media consumer in powerful ways. The efficacy of each medium to convey certain parallel signals effortlessly alters people’s epistemologies.

(Epistemology is the study of the way that people know things. Whether or not we know how to spell it, everyone has an epistemology.)

Not only how we acquire information but how we know is shaped by how information is received. Media is forming our minds to perceive in particular manners.

We need look no farther than click-bait internet articles to see that Postman is correct. There are entire companies that feed off of deceptive headlines that declare one thing in their headline and argue something entirely different in the body of the article. Even news sources that are still considered credible have recognized that few people read beyond the headlines and those who do are unlikely to get past the perspective that the headline has already presented, whatever the evidence is that runs to the contrary.

The reshaping of epistemology is radically important, even more so now than it was in 1985. Our elections have been tampered with by agents from other nations who spread misinformation with just enough truth to cast doubt. Our news sources have recognized this, along with the inability to discern opinion from fact in most of the population, and thus they have largely abandoned anything like an attempt at objective reporting because getting their constructed truth out is more important the facts. Additionally, with the wide array of “news” shows of varying degree of accuracy and political leanings available all 168 hours each week, the presentation of information has to be even more entertaining than before. In our current milieu, there appear to be a fair number of people that get their news through comments on social media rather than any legitimate news source (regardless of its bias). So, the cycle continues and the hole gets deeper.

Postman’s warning is an important one. It may even be easier to accept now that a quarter of a century has passed and the challenges have morphed.

Lacking from Postman’s analysis is an answer the for the disease that ails us. He’s standing athwart history yelling “STOP,” but does not provide a solution.

The truth is that there is no easy solution, and that the simplest solution (i.e., turning everything off completely), is unworkable because we and our children would be functionally disconnected from so much of society. However, we have to figure out a way to throttle the flow, learn how to think and exist without electronic devices, and recover some of the humanity that is being eroded with every flicker of our many screens.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

By Neil Postman

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