Social Media, Sin, and the Spirit

Bethany:          Where is my phone?

Fridge:             Who cares?

Martha:           We are in different bodies! It doesn’t seem like the most pressing concern at this moment.

Bethany:          Really? You don’t think this would be a good moment to make a call, or text somebody, or change your status to “stuck in a video game”?

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)¹

 

What a lot of likes. Like, you’ll notice, is a noun now, and friend is a verb.

I had it all figured out.

I was going to write a post called ‘If You Think Social Media Is Bad, You’re Doing It Wrong’, and I was going to talk about the good and helpful and uplifting things that using social media can achieve. I was going to talk about how easy it is now to keep up with friends that you no longer see in person – perhaps you only really hung out with them for a year or a season, but you still care about how they’re getting on – and find out when they start a new career or move country or get engaged or whatever else. I was going to talk about how helpful it can be to be able to check out people’s profiles: with people you’re going to meet in person shortly, to get a sense of what to expect, for instance, or with your friend’s new significant other to see whether or not you approve. I was going to talk about how thought-provoking it can be to read news articles and opinion pieces that pop up on your timeline because someone you follow shared them; it gives you a window into perspectives you wouldn’t necessarily seek out for yourself. I was going to talk about how much beautiful artwork and hilarious memes can brighten up a dull moment of the day, and how the global nature of the Internet means it can connect you with people whose interests and tastes and sense of humour nestle in almost exactly the same weird niche as yours.² I was going to talk about how much fun it is to be able to chuck requests for recommendations or suggested meet-ups into the digital ether and see how people you’d never have thought to ask in person respond; this year, for instance, I ended up going round the British Library’s summer exhibition on the history of writing with a random assortment of ten of my friends as a result of a Facebook post in which I wondered whether anyone would like to go with me.³ I was going to talk about the vast support networks one can call upon through online means, the way one can mobilise people all over the world to pray for a very specific concern. I was going to talk about all these opportunities social media gives us to be more and better connected with one another.

And I was going to shrug off all that stuff people say about how social media fosters jealousy and insecurity, as you watch everyone else showing off how brilliant their lives are and feel that yours fails to match up. It’s not something I’ve experienced very much – probably to some degree because my newsfeed tends to consist more of thought-provoking opinion pieces and hilarious memes than other people’s photographs of their ostensibly perfect lives, and to some degree because my aspirations and ideas of perfection are a bit off-piste – and so I sort of don’t see the problem. If it makes you sad, well, stop looking at it. But you know, why should hilarious memes make you sad? And I was likewise going to shrug off the complaint that we’re all glued to our devices all the time, that our private digital universes are killing off face-to-face interaction: I might not be that old but I’ve lived long enough to know that people have always wanted excuses and pretexts to escape human company for a bit; a phone is surely just a very effective and conveniently pocket-sized excuse of this type. If it’s getting in the way, well, stop looking at it. If the thing’s got out of hand, just stop. Don’t blame the product, with all its myriad benefits, for your own lack of self-control. If you think social media’s bad, you’re doing it wrong.

I had it all figured out. But then it suddenly hit me that actually, I was doing it wrong. I’d let it get out of hand. I couldn’t stop.

I’d got to a point where scrolling Facebook was essentially the default resting state of my brain. Every idle moment, there I was opening the app before I’d even realised what I was doing. It’s funny how it starts to feel like a need – how if I spend a few hours away from my phone, I get this strange sense of relief when I go back to it and start scrolling. Does this sound alarmingly like an addiction to you? Because once I actually started articulating this stuff to myself, it certainly sounded alarmingly like an addiction to me.

I hadn’t expected this. I suppose because I didn’t really relate to the problems people most often raised in connection with social media – the jealousy, the comparison, the pressure to present perfection – I thought I was immune to letting it foster sin in me. I wasn’t that girl. My Instagram consists primarily of pictures of interesting things I’ve found in museums; I think I’ve only taken one selfie in my life; I didn’t even have any social media accounts until I was sixteen, or a mobile phone until I was eighteen; I sometimes feel as if I would fit more easily into the society of a hundred years ago than I do into the current one.⁴ I couldn’t end up addicted to social media, in slavery to it, ruled by the need to look at it and letting that, rather than love or fear of God, shape my behaviour. Some people could, granted, but surely not I.

Well, that was blooming stupid, wasn’t it? It’s the sins you don’t think will ever get you that’ll do the most damage when they do. And make no mistake, every addiction – every way in which our attention is demanded and our affections diverted and our actions dictated by something other than God – is slavery and idolatry and sin. And sin must be killed, resolutely and ruthlessly. But that isn’t necessarily as straightforward to actually achieve as it sounds. Social media isn’t inherently bad – everything I said above about its benefits remains true – so just cutting it out altogether and calling the problem fixed is no real solution. The problem isn’t the product; it’s I. But of course, I, my heart and soul and self, am rather more difficult to fix than a mere product would be.

I tried a few things. I uninstalled the Facebook app so that I’d have to go through the mildly more inconvenient process of opening the site in my web browser in order to start scrolling, which I hoped might make me think twice rather than just start doing it automatically. And yeah, that helped a bit. I also imposed a rule on myself that I mustn’t let going on my phone be the first thing I did in a day – my morning routine, including devotional time, was always to precede it. And yeah, that helped a bit too. I tried to impose another rule that I mustn’t do any mindless scrolling after a certain point in the evening, but I found it impossible to enforce, because I use my phone for so many things (including as an alarm clock) and so there were just too many exceptions for the rule to do the job of covering any particular territory properly.

 

Not sure I’m ready to revert to this sort of thing having got used to my phone’s gentle waking tones of a morning.

So if you were hoping for an inspiring rehabilitatory journey, or a step-by-step self-help precedent, I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you. I don’t yet know how I’m going to continue to treat the problem. But what I am certain of is the need to continue to treat it. Sin must be killed. I may at some stage, therefore, end up trying a slightly more extreme solution than the minor adjustments I’ve made so far. Still, even if I do, that won’t really be the solution as such. It’ll be a tool in my hands – any more than that is just replacing one slavery with another.

Rules don’t make anyone righteous. If even the perfect Law, as directly revealed by God himself, couldn’t do it because it was weakened by the flesh, what chance does any other command or regulation stand? The law to which we are now subject is the law of the spirit, by which we are set free from every slavery. To live according to the law of the spirit is to set the mind on the things of the spirit. It’s not to impose constraints on the impulses of my flesh; it’s to drown them out with something better. If your spirit’s not alive, your flesh is all you’ve got, but we’ve been made alive in spirit, and so we can put the flesh to death because we have something better to fill up its place. Our old selves are already dead with Christ, our new selves alive in him; we don’t put the former to death in order to die, but in order to live more fully by clearing away the dead stuff.⁵

This is true in all areas of life, no less online than anywhere else. I’m never going to stop scrolling Facebook from being my default resting state by just forcing myself not to scroll Facebook; rather, that impulse needs to be usurped by something greater. I need to set my mind on the things of the spirit and let them clear away the dead stuff of the flesh. How? Well, scripture, prayer, meditation, and the encouragement of the saints, of course. How else is one supposed to get anything done?

I was going to write a post called ‘If You Think Social Media Is Bad, You’re Doing It Wrong’. But in light of what I’ve talked about, I would have had to subtitle it ‘If You Don’t Think It’s Bad, You Might Still Be Doing It Wrong’. There are a heck of a lot of things in the world that aren’t particularly good or bad in and of themselves, but that will nonetheless ensnare us in slavery and idolatry and sin given half a chance – not because of what they’re like, but because of what we’re like, weak in the flesh. But the remedy is always the same: to set the mind on the spirit; to consider what God has done for us in sending Jesus in the likeness of sinful flesh to condemn sin in the flesh, to leave the flesh dead and make our spirits alive with him – and thereby to have our attention and affections and actions realigned to reflect that phenomenal, earth-shattering, splendid and glittering truth. Mere rules won’t make us any more righteous, but wonderfully, graciously, the law of the spirit will. My old self is doing social media wrong; my new self is as perfectly righteous in all spheres of life as her Saviour. The nature of the task now is only to nourish and grow the latter so as to clear away the dead stuff of the former.

Footnotes

¹ Thanks as usual to Springfield! Springfield! for the script: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=jumanji-welcome-to-the-jungle. I’m not entirely sure whether I’ve ascribed all the lines to the right people, as I was doing it from memory, so apologies if not.

² A recent discovery I’m pleased to have made is Steve the Vagabond and Silly Linguist: https://www.facebook.com/stevethevagabond/.

³ The exhibition is closed now, but to give you a sense of it, here’s a very fun article about the development of the alphabet: https://www.bl.uk/history-of-writing/articles/the-evolution-of-the-alphabet.

⁴ Though I can’t say I fancy the idea of living through two world wars, so you know, I’ll take what I’ve got.

⁵ I’m basically getting all this out of Romans 8: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+8&version=ESVUK. Do check it out, a) to see whether you think I’m handling it legitimately and b) because it’s kind of the best chapter in the whole Bible.

Campfire Songs and the Death of Oral Culture

“I moved to the front of the room and clapped my hands for the room’s attention. Once the room was moderately quiet I began to play. By the time I struck the third chord everyone knew what it was: ‘Tinker Tanner’. The oldest song in the world. I took my hands from the lute and began to clap. Soon everyone was pounding out the rhythm in unison, feet against the floor, mugs on tabletops.

The sound was almost overwhelming, but it faded appropriately when I sang the first verse. Then I led the room in the chorus with everyone singing along, some with their own words, some in their own keys. I moved to a nearby table as I finished my second verse and led the room in the chorus again.

Then I gestured expectantly towards the table to sing a verse of their own. It took a couple of seconds for them to realise what I wanted, but the expectation of the whole room was enough to encourage one of the more tipsy students to shout out a verse of his own. It gained him thunderous applause and cheers. Then, as everyone sang the chorus again, I moved to another table and did the same thing.

Before too long folk were taking initiative to sing out their own verses when the chorus was over. I made my way to where Denna waited by the outer door and together we slipped out into the early evening twilight.

‘That was cleverly done,’ she said as we began to stroll away from the tavern. ‘How long do you think they’ll keep it up?’”

Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind (2007)

 

Our Guide campfires tend to be bigger than this one. And not as neat.

So you know ‘Baby Shark’?

In the event that you don’t, I feel I should warn you that, even though I have felt obliged to leave a link to the relevant video in the forthcoming footnote,¹ you may well find that your day is a better one if you refrain from clicking on it. The song is, to put it bluntly, blooming annoying. There isn’t really enough of a melody to call it ‘catchy’ per se, and yet it will still somehow manage to end up as firmly stuck in your head as chewed gum on the underside of a secondary-school desk. If you’re unlucky enough to have heard it already, I imagine it’s taking up its lodgings in your brain even now. Sorry. But I assure you I’m not just needlessly torturing you; I do have a point.

The thing is, the particular version of ‘Baby Shark’ that has so successfully impressed itself upon society’s consciousness is just that: a particular version, and a recent one at that. A Korean company called Pinkfong uploaded it to YouTube in 2016, and it went viral from there,² but the song itself is far, far older than that. I know, because we used to sing it as a campfire song at Brownies and Guides when I was a kid. ‘Baby Shark’ as we knew it was, as campfire songs tend to be, rather more violent than Pinkfong’s smiling, bubblegum version: it involved limb loss, failed cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and some very strange ideas indeed about life after death – although that last one is, again, standard practice with campfire songs. It’s a lot more fun than the Pinkfong one, though, and so when members of the Brownie unit in which I’m proud to call myself an Assistant Leader asked, during a singing session one meeting, whether we might sing ‘Baby Shark’ next, I was happy enough to oblige. What caught me by surprise, though, was that, when my version began to diverge from Pinkfong’s, the girls were rather put out and told me I was doing it wrong.

I mean, it would have been a fair enough comment, if it were the case that there were one correct incarnation of the song and I wasn’t singing it, but that simply isn’t how campfire songs work. They are fluid by nature. You learn them by ear of an evening and repeat what you remember later; you readjust, add or remove verses as suits your circumstances. You meet another unit at an event and swap songs and parts thereof that the other hasn’t heard before. These things are passed down through generations: they persist for decades and decades and, though unchanged in essence, they morph into new versions of themselves everywhere they go. In order to be doing ‘Baby Shark’ wrong, you’d have to be doing it in such a fashion as to render it unrecognisable. And yes, your unit will have certain verses it’s attached to, and it probably isn’t very kind or sensible to disregard that, but the valid complaint is, I don’t like that version, rather than, That’s not how it goes.

A baby shark. And its mother. That’s the first two verses gone.

But for those of my Brownies who’d learnt the song off YouTube rather than round a real or imagined campfire, it was conceived of as having a set form, à la Pinkfong. To be honest, I can hardly blame them for that. All I can really do is draw attention to the fact as exhibiting one more way in which our ever more codified society is making oral culture firmly a thing of the past.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a ginormous fan of codifying stuff. Write the thing down, make copies, digitise it, do everything you can to make sure it’s not lost to posterity: given that my day job at the moment entails producing codified forms of artefacts whose place of origin has lately been a war zone then overrun by extremists intent on the total destruction of anything and anyone inconsistent with their own narrow worldview,³ I’d be the last person to criticise any project designed to get some element of human culture concretely recorded in such manner as will last for future generations. And it’s absolutely brilliant that we live in a world where information can be laid up so that it’s unerasable and accessible to anyone, not vulnerable to war or extremism or fire or flood or anything. I love that we live in a world where it’s possible for people to carve their mark in digital stone and know that it will be there for anyone who likes – anyone mad enough, in Pinkfong’s case – to look at it. You know what, I’ll say it: the disappearance of oral culture – of the setup whereby traditions are passed on from one generation of a society to the next solely by word of mouth – is a price worth paying for modern information technologies. But am I allowed to affirm that, and still acknowledge a sense of loss or sadness that my Brownies know Pinkfong’s version of ‘Baby Shark’, as if it were some kind of universal canon, rather than a version they might have claimed for themselves in their own Girlguiding community? Am I allowed to permit the death of oral culture while still enjoying what I can of its last stronghold?

Because it does seem to me that, in the developed and digitised west at least, campfire songs are indeed the last great stronghold of oral culture. Where else are traditions handed down merely by speaking and listening in the same way? And their very orality is part of their essence, part of what makes them such enormous fun: the adaptability, the feeling of being in on something, even the openness to corruptibility. For instance, I know a campfire song about an ostrich who goes yodelling on a mountaintop – except that I recently learnt that I had been taught a corruption of an earlier incarnation in which an Austrian went yodelling. Obvious, really; I’m ashamed the thought never occurred to me before. But isn’t the idea of an ostrich going yodelling better fun? And since the song serves no higher purpose than that, who’s to say the version with the ostrich is wrong? It might represent a divergence from the song as originally conceived, but given that you’ll never manage to trace and pin down the ultimate original form of something in such a constant state of change and development as a campfire song, what does it matter? Or similarly, when I was first taught the song ‘Three Little Angels’ (which is as utterly daft and repetitive as just about anything you’ll ever sing round a campfire), I only learnt three verses, but when I later heard one in which some Boy Scouts try to get to heaven on a washing machine but are thwarted when the spin cycle ends, I was so amused by it that I rarely teach the song without it now; it would never occur to me to say of it that that isn’t how ‘Three Little Angels’ is supposed to go. There is no canonical form: the only criterion is what’s fun to sing.

 

I mean, just imagine an ostrich yodelling. Hilarious.

There’s rather a lot of going to heaven in campfire songs, actually. Possibly that tendency is partially blameable on the fact that many campfire songs stem from a time when culture at large was at least superficially Christianised. There’s a famous one called ‘You’ll Never Get to Heaven’ which could arguably be taken as a song of repentance if the whole thing weren’t so patently ridiculous: it has a chorus, as I learnt recently, that goes: I ain’t gonna grieve my Lord no more; I ain’t gonna grieve, I ain’t gonna swear, I ain’t gonna pull my sister’s hair; I ain’t gonna grieve my Lord no more. That comes after verses like, You’ll never get to heaven in a biscuit tin, ’cause a biscuit tin’s got biscuits in and You’ll never get to heaven in [insert name of leader]’s bra, ’cause [leader]’s bra won’t stretch that far. Total nonsense – but because campfire songs persist, and because they persist in use, moreover – not codified, not sitting gathering dust, not needing to be studied as foreign artefacts or translated from the forms in which they were captured all those years ago – they preserve, however imperfectly, the shapes of ideas that society as it is now would never generate of its own accord.

That’s not me saying that campfire songs might serve as some sort of roundabout evangelistic tool (that’s right, Brownies, you better had make a commitment not to grieve the Lord any more, because you never shall get to heaven in any covering but the blood of Jesus shed on your behalf, biscuit tin or otherwise) – as I say, they’re total nonsense, and meant to be taken as such. I suppose that’s what makes them so ripe for continued existence as oral culture in a world where instant information access on demand has left us all with terrible under-exercised memories: it really doesn’t matter if you remember them wrong, just as long as they’re a good laugh.

I suppose, in citing the lyrics of parts of ‘You’ll Never Get to Heaven’ above, I have made my own contribution to the great inevitable march towards codification. But you really can’t imagine that you know the song from a few typed-out lyrics. You have to sit there in a circle with your peers and learn this stuff by call and response. You have to laugh, and get it wrong, and forget bits, and make new bits up and see if they stick, and pick up elements of other groups’ versions and pass yours on to them. You have to hold it in your head and bring it out when the occasion calls for it and see what the thing becomes this time. Pinkfong doesn’t get the last word on how ‘Baby Shark’ goes: any campfire-song-singing community anywhere can inherit and adapt and maintain and hand on its own version.

At the end of the day, modern information technologies and campfire songs do, after all, have one important thing in common: they put the power to create and adapt and pass on certain material in the hands of ordinary randomers like you and me, without requiring the approval of any appointed higher authority that dictates what that material is supposed to look like. The same freedom that lets me teach the version of ‘Baby Shark’ I remember from my childhood to the Brownies, lets me upload blog posts sketching out my strange little thoughts for lovely people like you to peruse should they wish to. I dare to entertain a hope that the latter activity is of marginally more benefit to the pertinent audience than the former.

Footnotes

¹ Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

² Apparently helped along to some degree by Kpop groups like Blackpink performing it at their concerts. Personally I think Blackpink have much better things to do: if their video for ‘Ddu-du Ddu-du’ – currently the most viewed music video by any K-pop group – doesn’t convince you that Kpop is super fun, I’m not sure what will: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHNzOHi8sJs.

³ I work on stuff from what’s now Iraq. So … yeah. There are some glimmers of a positive future for the Iraqi heritage sector though: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/may/01/training-fieldwork-iraqi-archaeologists-of-the-future-qalatga-darband.