AMC’s The Walking Dead spinoff series, Fear the Walking Dead (beginning this summer) has me thinking. As modernity crumbles all around us and the world sees very real threats due to globalization, world view clashes, or climate change – there’s a rise of apocalyptic and dystopian stories in books, on TV, and in cinema. Uncertain and afraid, people turn to this genre to express their anxiety. Zombies are a favorite genre because they’re previously human monsters obsessed by the instinct to eat anything still living. Zombies are everywhere, a constant threat, and they won’t stop until every last living thing is consumed. A zombie apocalypse represents the sum of our fears.
Observe a zombie hoard among us – Nazarenes on social media! This zombie hoard has reached apocalyptic proportions and [depending upon who you listen to] is a harbinger of the end of the denomination and quite possibly, the world. We should fear #thesocialmedia, we are told, because it’s destructive to the denomination and is hell-bent consuming the flesh of the bride of Christ to the bone. Let’s consider #thesocialmedia.
There can be destructive power to #thesocialmedia. Content is uncontrollable because no one person is in charge. Conversation is unconstrained because words on a screen are easy to type without having to face a real person. Reach is unparalleled in a flat digital world. One must be attentive to the destructive potential of #thesocialmedia. Particularly, gossip (spreading falsehood as fact) & slander (defamation of character by spreading falsehood) are insidious threats in all conversation, especially #thesocialmedia. There is no place for this in healthy Christian community. The appropriate response to it is confession and repentance.
It’s wise to heed this concern about #thesocialmedia. Having participated in multiple online venues related to recent Church of the Nazarene institutional controversies, I can attest to the destructive power of the zombie hoard. There are some who’d be content to END the conversation there, as if that’s the definitive word on #thesocialmedia – It’s NOT. You see, zombie outbreaks have an origin. Was it caused by a virus? Comet impacting the earth? Government experiment gone wrong? Global ecological disaster? Justin Bieber’s hair? Zombie apocalypses don’t just happen by accident. The origin story matters.
Digging into zombie origin stories reveals zombies aren’t the main problem, rather, they’re the symptom of humanity gone awry. As the show The Walking Dead progresses, the greatest danger is not the zombies, but the humans. Humans created the means of their own apocalypse and the survivors left are exposed as the true threat to humanity. The real danger lies within human beings.
When there’s nothing to feed on, zombies mostly shuffle around in a docile manner like a herd of cattle. In fact, a mostly docile herd is MORE descriptive of #thesocialmedia conversations I’ve been a part of about recent Nazarene denominational issues than a raging zombie hoard. There are occasional voracious flare ups of gossip and slander, but that’s always checked by the community, which then steers conversation back to the issues. When there is nothing to feed on, the charitable discourse rolls on, discussing the root issues causing the crisis and what can be done to restore credibility and foster reconciliation. The existence of #thesocialmedia Nazarene zombie hoard is conditional and serves a necessary purpose. To understand that one only needs to consider its origin story.
As in a zombie apocalypse, the cure or way forward is impossible to discern until and unless the root causes are addressed. The origin of the current Nazarene #thesocialmedia zombie apocalypse is a response to three recent leadership crises in denominational institutions – Nazarene Publishing House, Mid-America Nazarene University, and Northwest Nazarene University. At BEST, important processes to institutional credibility were bypassed for expediency and/or personal agendas. At worst, they reveal fear, cronyism, and deception in institutional leadership. There is no place for this in healthy Christian community. The appropriate response to it is confession and repentance.
The Nazarene #thesocialmedia zombie hoard is a symptom, not the cause, of crisis. It doesn’t follow that the outcry about injustice is worse than the injustice itself. If we see #thesocialmedia as THE problem, we’re not listening. Think about this in terms of a marriage relationship. In pre-marriage counseling we teach communication and conflict resolution. Each person needs to learn the skills of assertiveness, active listening, and sharing in ownership of a conflict. We break peace when we try to silence communication or we blame the other for the conflict.
Some find the public discourse on #thesocialmedia troubling and thus declare ALL conversation therein as gossip and slander. First, it is NOT gossip NOR slander to expect institutional leaders to be servants who listen and act with humility or to be held accountable for questionable decisions. Second, let’s remember that public, prophetic critique has a long history within the Christian faith. Remember the Apostle Paul who confronted Peter for not eating with Gentiles and who wrote that he wished the circumcision group would castrate themselves. Remember Augustine who said, “the church is a whore but she’s my mother.” Remember Martin Luther who nailed 95 Thesis to a very public Wittenburg door. Remember John Wesley who preached from atop his father’s grave when denied access to preach in the Epworth church. Public, prophetic critique is a way the powerless speak to power.
Trying to silence and shame #thesocialmedia is not only pointless, it effectively communicates the message: “Your concerns are invalid.” Most don’t say this outright, but do this by saying: “You’re seeing it wrong. You’re stirring up trouble. You need to trust the people in charge. You need to stop questioning.” Ask yourself: Are you silent in the face of injustice? Do you care that many believe institutional religion is hypocritical? How do you respond to being invalidated by someone you love or someone in power over you? Your answers should help you understand the existence of the public discourse on #thesocialmedia.
The burden of leadership is the recognition that one is responsible for others and must set the example. Christian leadership is defined by conformity to Christ – who washed feet (John 13), who emptied himself and humbled himself (Philippians 2). To those whom much is given, much is required. While it’s right to acknowledge the dangers of #thesocialmedia, trying to silence or shame #thesocialmedia demonstrates blindness to the real crisis – institutional leadership integrity and credibility. Humble servant-leadership means being honest and confessing our sins first, so that others may follow in confessing their own sins – making reconciliation possible. In order to heal the racial divide after years of apartheid, Bishop Desmond Tutu established the Truth and Reconciliation commission. Confession is good for the community. Reconciliation begins with truth-telling.
I do fear #thesocialmedia – but not so much for the conversations it creates. I fear #thesocialmedia because of the real threat it exposes. Namely, we sometimes appear comfortable “doing business” like the powers and principalities of this world – lording power over others, manipulating the truth, silencing valid questions, and shaming people for taking notice. I fear leaders ignoring or dismissing #thesocialmedia just deepens disconnect between the institutions and the pews, especially for millennials, who are skeptical not only of religious institutions, but of the Christian faith itself.
In FAITH, not FEAR, it is my prayer that we see conflict as opportunity for communal and personal growth. It is my prayer that our conversations are absent gossip and slander. It is my prayer that persons in power embrace humility and lead with integrity. It is my prayer that we follow in the footsteps of our Crucified God, Jesus Christ. Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy.
JaRow,
I generally agree. But I’ve read enough Neil Postman to sense that there is a Faustian bargain we are making with social media that we don’t fully appreciate. Postman used to argue that you don’t have the culture plus television, you have a whole new culture. And that what people failed to recognize about tv is that it is by nature meant to be entertaining. So from his perspective, tv would always be great for things like sports (which it is) but would be destructive to serious political discourse (which it clearly has been and only seems to be making worse).
Social media does a lot of things really well. But it is simplistic and decontextualizing by nature. It is democratizing but it also makes consensus an impossibility. It gives voice to the marginalized while also giving voice to the unqualified. It invites transparency while majoring in narcissism and voyeurism. It gives people a sense of “doing justice” because they can care about problems globally, while it keeps people preoccupied and unaware of acts of justice close at hand. There a whole list…
So yes, it taps into root problems that were already there, but like all forms of communication it comes with limitations that make some form of discourse more possible while doing great damage to other forms of discourse.
I love a lot that it brings. But I wish we were more cognizant of its limitations. Limitations that are there because of its nature and not just because of our sinful nature.
Love ya – Scott
Excellent thoughts, Scott. I like reading Neil Postman … Sometimes I find him a little too much of a neo-Luddite.
Social media does have the limitations you mention. It is, however, a part of our world now. It does no good for leaders to pretend it’s not relevant or only destructive.
In the context of our Nazarene controversies, I am concerned that leaders are missing the point by focusing on social media as only negative. There’s been quite a few attempts to silence and shame it, with little validation or confession.
Love ya too, brother!
Reading this, Scott, I can’t help but also be reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media” in which he coined the term “The medium is the message.” He writes:
“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
In the book, he describes the process by which new media are created to “free” the population from some inconvenience (as cell phones “freed” us from being bound to landlines) but inevitably become leashes constraining us (as we are now inseparable from our cell phones and rely on them for the smallest things – like knowing a person’s phone number).
It will be interesting to see how we adapt to social media (for many, including myself, it’s already become a leash) and to see what new medium evolves from it.
McCluhan is one of my favorites re: media studies, Randy. The medium is the message. It certainly is that way with social media. And what is that message? We are here, we are participants, we have a voice. Obviously, there are dark-sides to this, but this is a type of “flattening” of power. Though there will be power dynamics at work, because everyone has access, they cannot be totally written off.
Nice piece, but… The problem for most of us is we have no facts, even the so called facts, are out of context, which of course renders them, no longer facts. Its a mess. I suppose I have learned one thing having a wife deeply engaged in national politics over the last couple decades: we rarely (ok never) have all the facts (if there is such a thing). I quietly exited once the mob mentality kicked in. Perhaps the upside to all of this is that several, most recently Charles Christian, are beginning to suggest the folks in the pews are much more interested in theology than we often give them credit for. Nice piece!
We should tread lightly where we don’t have the facts, Donald, in this we agree. It was probably wise for you step aside when the mob mentality flared up. The mob is a symptom, though, of questionable actions. There were a number of public acts and statements. The social media outcry didn’t begin as a zombie hoard nor end that way. It asked apporpriate questions and created necessary pressure to get to the truth. The job of “fact finding” falls to the review committee. This is why the zombie hoard around Tom Oord’s situation is mostly wandering like a herd right now…their job was accomplished to make sure their voices were heard and to make sure action was taken. It served its purpose. As I witnessed it – the zombie hoard became most mob like when people tried to say they shouldn’t ask questions or should just keep silent.
As Tony Campolo argues in a session before higher education professors, when the means of communicating information changes, what we value changes with it. A brief history of communication channel change: Oral storytelling = respect for elders > books/printed mediums = emphasis on content and youth who read the books > tv/movies = technical change/special effects (content isn’t important) > computer/ social media = self becomes the focus. The proliferation of websites allow everyone to think they are the center of attention as soon as they post something. This is a great temptation. We have only now started to deal with the implications. Like most technological advancements – it is a blessing and a curse. May God help us.
Cindy, you are right about the downside of narcissism and social media. Of course, narcissism is a human problem, but social media makes it much more present. I don’t think that social media is the cause of the self becomming the focus. That problem seems to go back as far as the Garden of Eden. There are, as you noted, dark-sides to all mediums of communication. In oral communication where only a few “had the stories” – elders had all the power and this created problems of abuse and belief in magic, for example.