By Kiefer Dooley
Techno-centered culture is stifling the ability of young people to interact in authentic, thoughtful, and sincere face- to-face conversations. More than that, it is changing the way we all live. Rapidly-developing technology impacts nearly every facet of our lives. Technological advancements in communication, specifically the development and use of social media platforms, profoundly affect our social development, education, family life, relationships, job searches, and views of things like politics and religion.
This radical shift toward primarily social-media-driven communication is changing our culture. Are we, as a Church, adapting to this profound change on the basis of how our individual worldviews are shaped, molded, and influenced? RMC’s youth department is grappling with this question in a search for the best way to reach our young people. Communication today is so different than what I experienced as a sophomore in high school at Ozark Academy in late 2008. I remember the first person to own a smartphone in our class. He was the envy of the entire student body. It was an iPhone 3G. This guy could easily access Facebook (then only 4 years old) on his phone! He could play games like Doodle Jump where the onscreen character reacted to the physical position and movements of the device using a sensor called an accelerometer. No one else could post a status to Facebook on his or her phone, much less play a game any more advanced than Screen Snake (a game where the user controls a dot “snake” around the screen with directional arrows. The snake eats other dots’ “food” and grows a pixel in length. When the snake grows so large that the user cannot keep it from running into itself, game over!). The rest of us were using flip-phones or Blackberries with physical keyboards, the greatest function being the ability to send short text messages.
Today, I see 12-year-olds carrying smartphones that have as much computing power as the laptop I used throughout college. The presence and interconnectedness of social media has also increased dramatically. Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram—these things did not exist a mere 5 to 8 years ago. We now see what amounts to the entire world at our fingertips and it may not be all for the best.
Smartphones perpetuate our ability to dive into social media at any time and often take away the need for face-to-face communication. It happens in my life all the time. Potentially awkward situation? Tired and don’t feel like talking to someone? Waiting in line by myself at Chipotle?
Any situation where I might begin to feel a twinge of insecurity, the easy answer is to pull out the phone and become immersed in a world of entertainment, news, likes, hearts, emoji faces, games, pictures, video shares, ads, thoughts, music—the list of distractions could seemingly go on forever. It is a parallel reality that is available at any time, but that ceases to exist as soon as the battery dies. It’s a world of thousands of superficial communications that quickly and easily take the place of substantial real-life interaction.
While the quantity of communication is enhanced by technology, the content remains surface level. A “long” text message is probably 150 words. If a long text message doubles to 300 words, it’s an epistle. Really? That is so short! Yet, most of our communication occurs in this manner. An entire relationship, of the dating variety, can develop and crumble with 80 percent of the communication occurring via text message. The messages fly back and forth, short snippets of thought in a steady stream of consciousness.
And it is not just texting that encourages quantity over quality. While Twitter limits the number of characters per “tweet” to 140, in an unprecedented move, Twitter recently released an update where photos, videos, animated GIFs, and polls will not count against the 140-character limit. Snapchat communication occurs in even shorter statements, utilizing a roughly 80-character limit for photo captions. Facebook allows posts to utilize an unheard of 63,206 characters.
But does anyone spew this much information in a single post? Hardly. According to research done by Maximilian H. Nierhoff, a writer for the Social Media Analytics Blog “Quintly,” the majority of Facebook posts fall between 2 and 103 characters. Nierhoff’s study took into account 13.5 mil- lion Facebook posts, finding that the distribution of posts by character length strongly resembles a bell curve with a peak at 2 characters and a strong drop off in number of posts beyond the 600 character mark.
A highly-managed and intentionally-cultivated image of many of our (young) people lies in these tidbits of information that spew out to the vast reaches of the Internet. As a collective, we only post what we are OK with people seeing. And what we are OK with others seeing largely depends on the target audience. Young people continuously participate in a sort of subconscious filtering of social media posts and are, in effect, continuously advertising themselves to others. Taking a brief look at some of the major social media platforms and the average content as associated with the intended (or perceived) audience substantiates this assumption. A few of the most popular social media platforms include LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat.
LinkedIn is highly regulated and very professional (the target user group is those older young people who are look- ing for full-time employment). Only the best about a person would appear on the LinkedIn profile. It is, in essence, a resume on steroids. A LinkedIn profile often has one or two very professional photos, a purpose statement from a recent resume, and a few paragraphs describing one’s academic achievements as well as goals and aspirations.
A Facebook profile tends to let a more “natural” expression of a person appear. The page may include a profile picture taken at just the right angle, a few photos from a weekend get together with some friends, and maybe a “rant’ intermingled among the litany of posts that show the best parts of a person’s life. A hurrah for summiting that most recent fourteener, a picture of an academic achievement, a cheer for a sports team, a lament over the current political atmosphere. These are all posts that regularly appear on my Facebook feed.
For most young people in the Church (and I’d argue that to some extent this extends to Facebook users in general) the Friday and Saturday night parties, the at-fault fender-benders, the loss of temper and ensuing fountain of argumentative and hurtful words directed at a friend, sibling, or significant other, the messier times in life, these surely don’t show up on the Facebook wall. Why not? Because as Facebook posters, we know the potential audience that lies within our online community: parents, teachers, pastors, and employers. It is a highly self-regulated environment.
Instagram is a hotbed of “perfect” pictures. Each one is carefully selected for its attractiveness and then highly edited or filtered to make it look better than reality. In the case wherein someone posts a picture that happened to turn out as post-worthy without editing, the user, as if by some unspoken requirement, will often post “#nofilter” along with the image to ensure the audience is properly enthralled by the sheer perfection of the image in question. Only the best pictures go up, because they can gather the most “likes.”
The regulation of social media breaks down slightly as the audience narrows. Twitter hosts its fair share of heated arguments and troubling posts, yet these still remain cultivated. There are plenty of horror stories recounting involuntary terminations of employment due to ill-conceived or unregulated Tweets. Such stories serve as a warning to the rest of the Twittersphere and the world of Tweeters remain more careful of their future Tweets.
Of all the social media platforms, Snapchat stories show the most authentic view of an individual’s life. Yet even Snapchat allows the user to regulate “real” life. It’s only as real to others as what the user chooses to share.
I believe that this constant, and often subconscious, regulation of our personal image seeps over into real-life interaction and communication. We are highly guarded at all times. On a cultural level, we have lost the ability to participate in real talk. We are not communicating authentically in our everyday lives and it is easy to carry the same guarded, regulated, and cultivated communication into church on Sabbath.
What young people are seeking is a Jesus-centered life. They often don’t know it because it is masked by more of the same brief, surface-level communication. It is all just noise and it gets in the way of Jesus. In church, we do not need to focus on the programming, on the production, or necessarily on scripted events. “The days of the light and fog machines and overly produced church services are a gone era,” says Tony Ranvestel, lead pastor at Clear River Church in Lafayette, Indiana, located near Purdue University. Young people are surrounded by advertising 24/7. They view advertisements and advertise themselves nonstop and none of it feels real. When it comes to church, we’re often striving to produce something flashy and attractive for the young people.
It will never work. Young people crave what they are missing. I strongly believe that we must simplify our approach to ministry and strive to communicate authenticity. It is imperative that young people come to view the Church as a place where they can make and develop open, authentic, and Jesus-centered connections with their peers and community leaders. In youth and young adult ministry, this may take place in a small group, a weekend campout, an open gym night, an evening playing board games, time spent rock crawling and mountain biking on the Western Slope, or at a ski retreat. In our Sabbath schools and church services, it will take place as we dive into and explore tough questions.
We must not be afraid to share our passions, our convictions, and most importantly, our struggles. Young people want to follow authentic leaders who are not afraid to communicate their low points along with the Facebook- worthy moments. They want to worship in an environment that supports the journey; they want to experience real talk.
Kiefer Dooley is RMC assistant youth director.