Last week I gave a lecture on social media and faith at St Anselm Hall, University of Manchester. Below is the complete transcript - though I admit I departed from the script in lots of places. It is *very* long - apologies! - and (for social media buffs) a bit basic in places. I hope you'll put up with the religion stuff too. Enjoy!
My hands are sweaty. My mouth
is dry and I am unaccountably thirsty. I cannot quite concentrate and am
restless. I pace up and down. My skin is itchy and one thought keeps going
through my head –‘Just one hit, it can’t do any harm, then I’ll stop.’
Any of
you who – like me – have ever had what some professionals call ‘substance-based
issues’ will know the ghastly mental tyranny of comedown and cold turkey. However, much as I know the agitation of withdrawal,
I’m not talking about the arsenal of illegal drugs or even nicotine. I’m
talking about my recent Lenten fast from Twitter and Facebook. For there is no
other way of putting it: as much as I can & do – through iron-willed
discipline – give up social media for six weeks each year, I am utterly and
shame-facedly addicted to the creation.
Well,
like all addicts, I decided to try and make a virtue of my addiction. If the
likes of Jimi Hendrix or Syd Barrett or even, heaven forfend, Eric Clapton could try to make
sweet music off the back of their drugs, I thought, 'Let’s see if there’s any
theology to be had in this. Let’s see where God is, if anywhere. Let’s see what
people like me and you have become in this digital age. Let’s see where the
church – that bewildering, irritating, sometimes outrageously unjust and unfair
and yet magnificent thing – lies in this wild west of internet exploration.'
In The
Tempest, Miranda famously says, ‘O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there
here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in’t!’
As a statement of hope and innocence – foolish innocence perhaps – it is always
relevant. In a world which – if it has always been shaped by imagination, myth
and possibility – has taken extraordinary steps into the virtual and digital it
is perhaps timely. Christians like me are called to be clear eyed about reality
and also to seek to live a story which has both a sense of the immense blessing
of creation and an honesty about its brokenness. The world-wide-web and its
myriad possibilities – not least social media – can appear a brave new world,
especially to the church, behind the curve as it often is. But we should not be
naive, tempting as it is to become Miranda. Nor should we be like Prospero...breaking
the staff... abandoning the book of magic. Social networking/social media can
appear to be full of ghosts and ghouls, mere baseless fabric and insubstantial
pageant. But in rejecting it we risk rejecting our very selves. We truly are such stuff as dreams are made on.
Love
it or loathe it, Social Media will not be going away any time soon. Facebook
has gone from being a resource for Harvard students to one of the central means
people use to communicate and organise their lives. Equally, Twitter really is
an extraordinary creation. We have perhaps all heard of the notion of an idea,
a video, a meme, going viral – e.g. the famous video of Fenton the dog chasing
deer in Windsor Great Park – spreading from contact to contact like a virus;
Twitter seems almost the acme of the viral. Traditional news and print media
have bought into Twitter in a massive way not least because it has had to come
to terms with the speed with which news spreads on it, leaving traditional
methods behind. This speed and lack of verification can be one of the negatives
– the number of times that people announce that celebs have died and then had
that spread around twitter has become tedious – but I also remember how extraordinary
twitter was during the 2011 riots.
In a
sign of the power and perceived influence of social media, every band, every organization, every company
seeks to have a Facebook page; partly because of the sheer reach of FB – about
1Bn and growing ; this interest in having a page is hardly based on mere
altruism -1bn people represents a lot of marketing opportunities, but, because
of the ‘like’ system on Facebook, organizations can use FB to measure interest
in what they have to offer; and while FB remains free it is also saturated with
advertising metrics which tailor ads to individuals’ interest and likes (e.g.
for me – lesbian, metal, poetry books (!?!); & b), to underline a previous
point, any news or media organization worth its salt, will have a twitter
account; now twitter has not penetrated the market in the same way as FB – 140
m users, 10 m in UK – but it is seen as a dazzlingly quick way of flashing
info, news and ideas (true and false, good and bad) around the world. That is
of influencing info, news agendas, and ideas. If the WWW was seen as a
revolution in information and communication, then twitter – for now – appears
to be its ultimate concentration: one hundred and forty characters of info
& ideas that spreads more quickly and successfully than a virus.
And to
get down to it: social media is a fundamental place where we – especially as
individuals, but sometimes as communities – tell & perhaps increasingly
locate & discover our stories. For what are we, if we are not makers of
stories? And those who live stories? And those who search for stories to live
by? We are fleshlings who are enraptured by the imagination’s power. We are
that creature/animal who is story making and story-living; we are myth-making
and myth-loving. We search for stories to live by and understand themselves
very readily in terms of stories. We have ideas about ourselves, as individuals
and as communities, typically expressed in stories, which are foundational for
identity. The kind of stories which are most deeply embedded and/or most
substantially evidenced - and how we prioritize that distinction probably tells
us a lot about what kind of stories we like - are the kinds of stories we see
as true or forming our social and personal facticity. And part of our
fascination with stories is, yes, the human love of entertainment, but it also
reflects our need to shape and frame a world, and a way of communicating
values, hopes and dreams.
Indeed
stories are so powerful for us that rather than us using them to shape a world,
we often feel that we unite ourselves to them; they shape us, form us, guide
us, perhaps even write us; whether these be the myths and stories of a culture,
of a faith, of a family or an interest group. To be human is to be a kind of
writing; the only question is, which genre? Story telling is one of our
fundamental cultural practices and we initiate the young into it from the
moment a child is born. Therefore it should come as no surprise that Jesus used
parabolic storytelling, not merely instruction, rule-telling or lecturing in
order to help us embody & live the gospel. The most potent moments of the
gospels often seem to me, at least, opportunities for us to locate ourselves in
the story or situation; to imagine how we might take it on or react, to shape
it and be shaped by it.
Part
of our gift as storytellers is our ability to use things which are not facts to
tell the truth. It is a fundamental indication of what conveniently might be
called ‘imagination’; ‘x’ does not actually need to have happened in a
physical, time-bound sense in order to capture something true and real. Indeed,
sometimes the joy of storytelling is the impossibility (in terms of physics,
biology etc) of the story; I am conscious that as a poet I am constantly
playing with impossible things – the breaking of gravity, the transformation
and transmutation of one thing to another – in order to open up a world. In our
stories we are, like Prospero, alchemists & magicians.
And
all this matters in any attempt to look seriously at social media and for any
attempt to discern the rumour of God in its midst: For twitter and facebook are
human artifacts, but like all human artifacts have the capacity to shape us and
tell us more about who we are. And I happen to subscribe to that rather old
fashioned formulation that how we see ourselves reveals much about how one
might see God; and how one might see God says much about we see ourselves. However,
if we are the kind of creatures who search for stories to live by, we are also
living in an age of fragments, of individualism and scepticism. We are living
in the time where the fashionable story is that there is no story...unless we
admit to a narrative driven by scientism – i.e. the reductive belief that the
only story which counts is the one we can provide particular, testable kinds of
evidence for.
Stories
are perhaps more important than ever – for in a disenchanted & fragmented
age – human believability can be pulled in many directions. Some people have
characterized this as the claim, ‘When folk stop believing in God they’ll
believe in anything’. While I’ve encountered many people who believe in any
number of things, I’m not sure this is quite nuanced enough. If we are story
loving and story living animals, we will bring together any number of factors –
our past, residual, culturally embedded faith narratives, cultural values, our
family stories, aspirations and so on. One aspect of this ‘portmanteau’
approach to identity is the way in which ‘trust’ in stories can be both
light-hearted, deliberately ironic and yet quite serious.
So here’s a
picture for this new frontier, this wild west of the imagination. For I’ve
always been a sucker for westerns – for their tales of frontier towns, of the
lawless west, of the pioneer. The philosopher John Locke said, ‘Once all places
were America’; writing as he was in the 17th century, I think he
meant that once all the world help possibility and openness and the promise of
the undiscovered country. Perhaps for us social media is still that place. And
so I think of that Hebrew word, that picture of the divine imagination, ‘Yasha’. Christians typically connect the
word ‘salvation’ with our faith in Jesus Christ. But if we go back to the Old
Testament we discover that the Hebrew verb for ‘to save’ is yasha. It is from this word that the
name Jesus (meaning ‘he who saves’) comes. Yasha
means ‘to be wide, to be spacious’. Its opposite is sara, which means to be narrow, whether physically, intellectually
or spiritually.
So, in Old
Testament terms, ‘salvation’ has to do with having or getting space in which to
move or breathe. This space gives the possibility of choice, of growth and
development. On these terms, the question of our salvation becomes a focus upon
how spacious and generous our souls are. A key question is: am I a person who
is broad and open, who is open to growth and change? Are we a community which
is closed or open? The extent to which we are on a journey to salvation is the
extent to which we are becoming more open and more generous human beings. This
is why the land matters in Jewish thought – as a metaphor for and as a real
statement of promise – of a place where we can breathe and be and thus be
saved. Being open is a kind of salvation.
I am
conscious that, while I am a busy priest thoroughly engaged in all sorts of
human pastoral and social relationships, I am single and in some respects fit
the notion of the solitary person mediating her isolated world via an internet
connection. Nonetheless, I don’t think I’m overstraining things when I say not
only ‘my world’ but my sense of self has been expanded by participating in
social media; I don’t mean in terms of an absurd delusion of grandeur, but of
feeling like I am present in the world in a wider way; that I am part of
something greater – partly a greater conversation, but perhaps even a wider
story. I want to be careful here, because one aspect that might bear more
careful teasing out is whether one is simply engaged in an act of association
with other people’s stories (like a virtual venn diagram) or a uniting of one
story with others, or a commitment to that. However, one plays it, I’m struck
by how far how I see the world and myself and others has been changed by social
networking. This is a dimension of yasha,
of spaciousness and a hint of the divine.
There
has been a profound change from physical to digital identity; the simple fact
is that more and more people are seemingly storing more and more of
‘themselves’ – or at least many of the key markers of their identity –
electronically; FB is simply littered with people’s photographs; increasingly
photographs – a key modern way of representing a moment of physical reality –
have no obvious physical reality; they exist as 1s & 0s on cameras, hard
drives and increasingly on Cloud systems that take them beyond one physical
location (servers); the markers of memory are laid down in digital space beyond
one’s own computer.
In
David Eagleton’s book Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives, in which an atheist
neuroscientist imagines varieties of ‘afterlives’ or heavens, one version has
the dead living on in the form of electronic data tended by self-supporting
computers. Literature aside, I am conscious of how once info is up on the web
there is a sense in which it is there forever. The FB profiles of the dead,
unless taken down by family and friends, stay in virtual space like memorials;
depending how much work the person put into them when alive, they are sites of
memory and story – of their likes and loves, their commitments, their visual
memories. The dead stare back at us through our LED screens.
Part
of the fascination of Social Media lies in its role in societies which are
increasingly ‘post-religious’ in any conventional sense. However, what is clear
is that social media gives people a sense of participating in something much
greater than themselves, in a bigger story – one of the classic roles of
traditional religion. Facebook enables folk to be friends with and communicate
with people who they may never even have met. Twitter enables communication on
another level: people are able to engage in conversation with not only
like-minded others, but people they may traditionally have been very distant
from – senior politicians, celebrities, musicians and so on. How deep this
conversation goes is moot; however, many people are finding they have expanded
rather than diminished senses of their identity – where their identity has
cyber dimensions as well as conventional ones. I use Twitter as a key
networking tool, whether to discuss my journalistic, poetic or theological
writing, a process made more difficult without its immediacy. Being a vicar and
a woman ordinarily means that people have expectations about how I act and what
matters to me; social media enables others to respond to me without making
judgments based on my appearance, accent and profession. Clearly this has
dangers: social media presents opportunities for fraudsters and the malicious
to present false personalities, but (accepting that one must not be naive about
who people claim to be) the simple fact remains: social media reflects an
expansion of many people’s worlds rather than their diminishment.
And
yes there are issues. One can sometimes get the impression from reading a
twitter feed or a facebook profile that one is at the Narcissist’s Ball. Those
ghastly circular letters folk send out at Christmas telling the poor
unfortunates who happen to be our friends about how Ophelia has been offered a
Fellowship at Corpus Christi at 12 and so on - they ain’t got nothing on
twitter and facebook. Twitter – with its requirement to be punchy – invites
short statements about what one is up to. While I try to be self-undermining, I
often catch myself tweeting about ‘all the exciting stuff I get to do, blah’.
Sometimes you get the impression on
twitter that everyone is a ‘writer’ or ‘artist’ or ‘someone a bit quirky’ as if
one were in an online version of one of those chi-chi independent tea shops you
get in South Manchester. And in an age where it has become fashionable and
indeed expected to treat oneself as a product or asset to be sold or promoted
(‘sell yourself’ the young are told) and in which folk take their own stories
very seriously – actors at the centre of the stage – why should be not expect
social media to reflect self-promotional trends? Twitter and FB remain human
and therefore reflect our idiocy and vanity and sinfulness. I am struck by some
of the extraordinary conversations I have got into via twitter and facebook –
often with folk I’ve never met. Given that social media is a human creation, it
cannot be considered either cultural and ethically neutral or logically good in
and of itself: Human artifacts are always compromised by the simple fact that
we make them. They reflect our limitations and interests.
None
of us are immune to a retreat into comfortable networks and mutually affirming
narratives which feed our identity. Indeed, many suggest that one of the key
features of the internet age, is the priority of creating networks and
associations over community; one selects the groups one wants to be part of;
one chooses the storyline we commit to and, often being based on shared
interests like what films or music or games or religion one likes, one isn’t challenged
or troubled out of one’s comfort zone. Truth is, my hunch is that it is too
soon to make too many grand pronouncements about the state of the electronic
nation; I have friends and colleagues whose give the impression their whole
lives are spent either gaming, on twitter and facebook and yet, the vast
majority of us – as long as we’re not teenagers and students – have got all
sorts of commitments, interests and responsibilities that pull us outside of
comfortable fantasies, and cosy stories. But surely, it is lazy to blame people
for treating their lives as networks of comfortable relationships rather than
communities of commitment and challenge; people have always lived in villages
of the mind – parochial, fearful, searching for security. The internet may
simply have transferred this aspect of our being to global possibilities.
Social
Media can be addictive and placing it in its proper perspective is
important. Even if many people
have abandoned religiously endorsed senses of the Transcendent, it is evident
that in social media people are experiencing a world which takes them beyond
traditional expectations and possibilities. This isn’t simply about ‘ordinary’ folk
being able to talk to so-called celebrities. Nor is it simply about the ill,
disabled or house-bound being able to connect, although this is significant to
many, including myself. There is another possibility: In a society which many
have suggested is increasingly divided and privatized, social media offers one
way of helping people to connect. Clearly, it cannot offer the deep solutions
to social malaise many are searching for, but I, for one, have been struck by
the way social media has pushed my social networks. It can be uncomfortable to
engage in fierce and immediate conversation with people from very different
theological, political and cultural expectations to oneself, but it is both
stretching and often rewarding.
I want to suggest that it is possible to embody our growing
into Christ in a virtual way; once we get past the notion that it is a separate
and false world, as if it were a new version of Calvinist picture of the world
of the flesh, fallen and lost, one can begin to see how it becomes another
place we can inhabit. And if it is co-terminus with the worlds – the stories –
we have inhabited since we got down out of the trees, and simply offers new
possibilities it becomes a place for us to live our simultaneously broken yet
hopeful journey with God. How exactly we do that is complex. Aside from the
high levels of throwaway nonsense – to which I, as a fun-loving human being, am
an avid contributor – Social Media represents a remarkable Christian and human
opportunity. The way in which this has been most explored is as an evangelistic
or missionary tool. Given the almost global reach of Social Media, propagators
of the faith have been quick to see the opportunities to place the Gospel
message before new audiences. Intriguing as this effort may be it is not what
most interests me. (Why? Much of it isn’t subtle enough – it’s the cyber
equivalent of people shouting on streets about God.)
There
is also, as I see it, something rather beautiful and striking about Social
Media. This perception is drawn from the fact that social media is
simultaneously ephemeral and permanent. Consider Twitter. Tweets are tiny
parcels of words, thrown into cyberspace. Most get immediately lost and
ignored. They are ephemera. And yet, because they are in cyberspace, they also
have an odd permanence – they simply float in cyberspace for all time, like a
tiny chip of an asteroid in space. And sometimes someone tweets something snappy,
brilliant and clever. And, you see it for a moment. If you like it perhaps you ‘retweet’
it to your followers, and then it's gone into cyberspace. This odd combination
of the permanent and the insubstantial mirrors key truths of our lives and of
God. This very fragility and solidity lies at the heart of God: in the fragile
existence God chose to embrace in Jesus and in the permanence that extends that
love across all time. The beauty lies in the interaction of both.
It is
possible that one way God’s story is present in things like Twitter is as a
form of subversion. I hope it’s clear by now that everything online – like many
things offline – is saturated with advertising, promotion of self and money and
the capitalist dream and, well, with what might be called ‘propaganda’; that
is, with information that is selling us stories that make us less free to
think, explore, dream and ultimately be our true selves – creatures who see the
world aright, as both a place of play, possibility and commitment. Propaganda
wants us to be stirred within ourselves in order to commit to a particular
position. Clearly, on this picture it is possible and perhaps necessary for the
Christian message to be reduced to propaganda.
One
way of exploring this Christian narrative is by suggesting that it is the story
of how we, as human beings, are called to be and actually may be our true
selves. Thomas Merton’s story of ‘the tree’ may be instructive here:
Merton
suggests that each of us can give no greater glory to God than being ourselves
– our true selves. So it is for all creation: a tree gives glory to God by
being a tree. But for the tree that’s not a difficult thing to do – it cannot
be other than its essential ‘tree-ness’. But for humans, it’s terribly
complicated. We have so many possibilities and paths before us. We carry the
splinter of brokenness within us. And so the only way any of us can know and be
truly ourselves, is to know ourselves in God. For only God sees the picture
clearly. Only God holds me in my completeness. A journey into self, then, is a
journey into God.
There
is then a call for us to grow into authenticity and who we really are,
and this is arguably something
which prioritizes community ahead of individualism or at least does not imagine
that individualism is an end in itself. At another level it is about uniting
our story – personal and corporate – to the story of God. It is then a
willingness to be a creature who – if we search after stories to live by –
understands there is one fundamental story which makes our own stand out and be
whole: God’s story. Sam Wells once called the Christian story ‘a satire on the
story that there is no story’;
Christians will not ultimately end the story in barrenness, failure and
tragedy. We will want to say that even if the world is experienced as a human
tragedy it is ultimately a Divine Comedy. But still we are called to be
faithful to experience and reality; clear-eyed and honest. And though we may
each experience many kinds of resurrection and love, there are dimensions of
living which should be seen and lived for what they are. And the hope of God in
those places is not about trying to find ways of ‘feeling better’ about them,
but is about waiting. And that waiting may take till the end of time to be
brought to fullness. And how we live in the midst of a world which seemingly
lacks grace, does matter. For in the practices of Confession and Forgiveness,
of Eucharist and so on – in participating in them – we hint at a story which
exposes the emptiness of a story-less world.
However,
it is also true that there are other kinds of human activities which seek to liberate
our imagination, grant us space to think and resist our instinct to make them
useful. Liturgy and poetry are perhaps two such examples. We can use liturgy to
make us feel better or worse and so on, but at its heart is a story that is
about setting us free to simply be ourselves. Equally poetry - though it can be
made to serve political and practical ends – is most itself when it opens up
imaginative worlds. Absurd as it may sound, I sometimes have glimpses of this
God-centred reality on social networking sites. There is – as one of my
followers put it recently – too much of the playground and the shop about
twitter; but there are moments of quite useless but thought-provoking art.
There is wit and delight and laughter. As another tweeting cleric (Wealands
Bell) put it:
Tweeting is
like any other art form: you can plug away, turning out decent tweets all day
long, and get nowhere. But you keep on, chasing.
