The Mortal Sin of Social Media

“Those sins are judged to be mortal which contain in themselves some grave disorder in regard to God, our neighbor, ourselves, or society.” ---Catholic Encyclopedia

           Of course, the very term “social media” is a lie. The thing we call “social media” does not create a place in which human beings gather to exchange ideas, hear diverse opinions, and learn from each other. The “space” called “social media” is no space at all but a series of digital downloads. There is no interpersonal interchange in “social media.” 

           The process of communication in social media involves an individual, sitting alone, in front of a digital device, encoding messages and downloading those messages onto the device. This communication is not interaction. It is display. As display, it does not engage, it expresses alienation.

When I speak to your face, I must be cognizant of your responses. I must take care to respond to your verbal and nonverbal cues. When I keyboard a message onto social media, I don't communicate with you. I enter content onto a digital device. I don't have to consider your responses. I cannot see them. You are hidden behind the digital display on my device.

Moreover, that very device trains me to not consider you at all. By the way in which it is programmed, “my” device trains me to consider only my opinion and to consider that opinion as absolute.

My digital device tracks every swipe, click, tick, everything I do on the device and online. It collates that information, analyzes it, and feeds back to me what an algorithm says I want to hear. My device does that constantly, whether I’m on it or not. It tracks my location. It tracks my activity. It tracks me. And, in tracking me, it creates and recreates my experience. It feeds me advertising the algorithm says is of interest to me. It feeds me “news,” which is not news in the traditional sense of the word, but stories the algorithm says fit my prejudices. It directs me across the Internet to sites the algorithm says are of interest to me.

My device claims to feed me the world. What it really feeds me are my own prejudices, interests, and desires. As my sole window to the social media world, it feeds them to me as if they defined the world. And, on my device, they do define the world.

As that device feeds me my own prejudices, it authorizes them as truth within the experience of the world my device opens to me. It offers me no other alternatives. It feeds me a world built from my own prejudgments.  It propagandizes me with my own propaganda.

In doing so, it alienates me from you. I cannot see the world from your eyes through my device. I can only see the world through a trumped up version of my own eyes---a version that I’m being programmed to see as the only truth (or, more accurately, Truth). My device creates a world for me in which I am god.

My choices define the world. My choices create the world.  I am god of my digital world.  But, if I am god of my mediated world, I am a jealous god. There shall be no other gods before me. No other gods shall compete with me. My truth will be the only truth. You do not exist. As god, my world is a world of absolute alienation.

“The Prisoner” was one of the iconic television shows of the 1960s. It is remembered most for the tag line to the show’s opening credits. Hidden in an impenetrable prison called “The Village,” prisoner Number 6 cries out, “I am not a number. I am a free man.”  That cry became perhaps pop culture’s most famous expression of the individualistic values of the 1960s.

The show’s primary auteur was Patrick McGoohan, a, by all accounts, deeply private and deeply religious Catholic actor, producer and director. McGoohan’s show has long been celebrated for pitting one strong-willed “free” man against a system that wanted nothing more than to have him give up one small fragment of his personal freedom. Never during the entire run of the show does Number 6 give in. No matter what the authorities do to him, he never gives up one bit of his personal autonomy.

The show’s concluding episode has long been a source of frustration for many fans, particularly those who identified closely with Number 6’s fight for personal freedom. For sixteen episodes, the mysterious head of the Village tried every means possible to break down Number 6’s will, to get him to conform. Each time, the head failed. In the seventeenth episode, McGoohan makes it appear that the head of the Village, the tormentor of Number 6, was Number 6 himself. After fighting against the absolute powers in control of the Village, Number 6 finds that he was perhaps the power himself. Like a god, Number 6 created a fantasized and closed universe into which Number 6 was pressed to conform.

It has been suggested that the conclusion of “The Prisoner” might have been shaped by McGoohan’s religious beliefs. In Catholic belief, success in the human spirit is not found through defeating others. It does not come from defeating those who would impinge on my freedom. Others may seem to control some part of my world. But, in the end, they do not control me. I make the choices that define my being. Mine is the voice I listen to. I am the god of my life.

In Catholic thought, listening only to my own voice, being the sole god of my life makes it impossible for me to hear the voice of the other God. In deifying myself, I alienate myself from God. That, in Catholic doctrine, is a mortal sin.

The same holds true for human communication. As I deify myself, as I take my voice as the only voice of Truth, I make it impossible to hear that other human voice . . . your voice. Dialogue is only possible when I take your voice as equally valid as mine. True human interaction begins when I deny myself my self-ordained role as god, when I hold you as my equal, when I hold your opinion as having as much validity as my own---both, perhaps to be tested by an external rule of logic, reason, accepted social values.

The mortal sin of social media is that it programs me away from that response. Social media creates a world of absolute alienation in which I am the sole arbiter of truth. I am the god of my world. Your opinion defines an alien world, a world I cannot inhabit, just as you cannot inhabit my world.

If I am to act as a human being toward you, I must defeat not only myself but my digital device. I must let go of a world that is not mine, a world that has been created by designers and marketers but has been sold to me as my own world. And I must cross over to a world that may be both yours and mine. I must deny myself, put down my device, and talk to you.

Let this be my devotional activity to the human race and to you. Be seeing you.