An important consideration when it comes to social media is the difficulty of maintaining a large number of digital connections in your life. These superficial acquaintances do not fulfill the need for meaningful relationships.

SHALLOW CONNECTIONS

Too often people think they can substitute a few meaningful relationships with a larger group of shallow and superficial online connections. The need for fulfilling friendship can’t be pieced together from hundreds of different people.

A POUND OF PENNIES

Collecting a pound of pennies will never be the equivalent to a pound of gold. Gold is presently around $1700 per ounce. A pound of gold is worth $27,200. The equivalent worth in pennies would take 2,720,000 pennies. A single penny weighs .088 ounces, so one hundred pennies weigh 8.8 ounces. The number of pennies needed to match a pound of gold would weigh 14,960 pounds. Over 7 tons!

A HEAVY BURDEN TO BEAR

You couldn’t carry 7 tons of pennies or benefit from them easily. And the more social media connections you have, the heavier the burden you bear, with minimal value when it comes to finding meaning in personal relationships.

Instead, go for the gold and invest your time in a small number of deep and meaningful relationships.

Another concern with online social media is how the entire system has been gamified through follows, likes, comments, and shares.

This is what allows for quantified popularity, like keeping score in a video game.

A SYSTEM TO GAUGE POPULARITY

This system is designed to gauge popularity but not in order to help your personal well-being. If you are not secure in your identity outside of digital social, it is going to be a greater obstacle for you.

Big tech doesn’t care about your personal well-being, they care about getting more of your attention on their apps, just as a game designer works hard to keep players engaged in the game. Why?

YOU ARE THE PRODUCT

They are making you and your time a product to be sold to advertisers. This was demonstrated clearly in the Netflix original documentary “The Social Dilemma” and though I’m not personally a fan of Netflix, if your family already has a subscription I would recommend you sit down with your family and watch it.

It is eye-opening when you hear from former employees and designers of these apps, and they don’t hesitate to reveal that the systems they built are designed to make you the product to be sold.

“WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT FACEBOOK?”

I began speaking about social media, starting with MySpace in 2003, and afterwards, Facebook in 2005, during the early days of their introduction into mainstream culture. I sometimes felt like a lone voice of caution. Parents and sometimes a teen would ask “What do you think about Facebook?” I had set up my own profile early on to try and understand it. Even then you were asked when posting “What’s on your mind?”

That’s quite a question to ask when you are about to broadcast to the world what is on your mind. A more important question to ask, is your heart in the right place, is it in alignment with God? The potential problem of amplifying your thoughts on social media platforms is brought to light in the following words of Jesus in Luke 6:43-45

“For a good tree does not bear bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. For every tree is known by its own fruit. For men do not gather figs from thorns, nor do they gather grapes from a bramble bush. A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil. For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”

THE FRUIT FROM YOUR TREE

What you post is the fruit from your tree, the manifestation of what is really in your heart. If your heart is not governed by God’s Spirit, if it has not been transformed by the gospel, if it has been poisoned by deception and sin, then what you post is going to be bad fruit.

But on the positive side, if your heart is submitted to God, if it is being transformed by His Spirit, and you are full of life through the gospel of Jesus Christ, then your social media posts will reflect a good heart which produces good fruit.

So, your social media posts can be used to inspect your heart, is it in the right place or the wrong place. What is inside is going to make it outside by what you communicate, and these are merely platforms for broadcasting what comes out of your heart. Or as an old saying goes, “What’s in the well comes up in the bucket.”

Social media can be a wonderful tool when used carefully and intentionally with wisdom. But unfortunately, the more teens spend time on social media, the more anxious, depressed, and sometimes suicidal they become according to research. Why is that so?

One reason is what is referred to as “upward comparison”.

COMPARING YOURSELF WITH SOMEONE ELSE

Let me explain downward comparison first, that is when you are comparing yourself with someone that you think you are better than according to the apps methods of keeping track of your popularity through likes, follows, shares, and comments.

You look at someone else’s profile and posts and see that they don’t get as many likes, they don’t have as many followers, and the comments they receive are fewer or more negative.

That is downward comparison and though you may not feel empathy for the other person, your own ego, your own sense of worth is boosted by the knowledge that you are more popular than someone else.

UPWARD COMPARISON

But most comparison is the other direction, upward comparison. You see yourself as less popular than others based on their quantified popularity. I hope you understand quantified popularity.

You can add it up, or size it up, they have more followers than you, they get more likes than you, they receive more positive affirmation in comments than you, and so on.

Their popularity is quantifiable like points in a game. Who wins? The person with the most points. It makes you feel unpopular, unloved, unimportant, no matter how hard you try to get more attention. And this often leads to anxiety and depression.

IT’S HARD TO GET ATTENTION

It’s hard to get attention because the market of social media is saturated and there will always be a handful of breakthrough profiles that gain popularity and give the false hope that maybe it will be you someday that becomes popular, and maybe you’ll finally feel liked, appreciated, and important once you achieve some level of prominence in your social network.

LIFECHANGING TRUTH

Can I tell you something that can be lifechanging if you will take it to heart? Your worth, your value as a person is not defined by popularity on social media no matter how much the pressure from culture tries to convince you otherwise.

Many famous people have committed suicide. They had fame, they had fortune, but popularity and money cannot fill the void in your soul for meaning and purpose.

But not enough people in your life are telling you this. If you merely march along with the crowd, you will find yourself empty if you haven’t found your identity in something eternal instead of fleeting popularity.

WHAT IS MORE VALUABLE?

It is intrinsically more valuable in your life to cultivate a few close friends rather than 100 or 1000 superficial social media connections. And it is eternally more valuable to cultivate your relationship with God who gave you life and gives you worth.

Social media can be a useful platform for broadcasting helpful information to others as long as your understanding of worth is not defined by responses from others on the platform.

DON’T LET IT DEFINE YOU

For example, let’s say you are inspired by a Bible verse you read so you post a meme in hope that it will inspire someone else, not boost your ego. Two friends like your post and that’s all. Well, you need to be okay with that and not let it define you. Maybe one person other than yourself was inspired. But then the next day someone posts a negative comment about your religious fanatical ideas and are sick of you shoving your religious views down their throats.

Maybe it’s time to refine your friend list or at least mute the person or just forgive them and not get hurt, knowing that they are the one who needs to find real purpose in life.

Many if not most states have laws against texting while driving because of how dangerous it is. Why? Because multitasking like texting and driving is a myth.

RAPID TASK SWITCHING

Studies have shown that you are not truly multitasking, you are rapid task switching. When your attention is on your phone it is not on the road. You do not have two sets of eyes.

When it comes to rapid task switching, there is also a switching cost. This is not only an issue with texting and driving but trying to multitask in other areas of life.

A SWITCHING COST

If you are focusing on your homework but you have your phone with you and you are getting and checking notifications, you are not doing your homework and checking your notifications simultaneously, you are rapidly switching between two or more different activities that require your attention.

In between the shift in your focus, there is a switching cost. You lose focus on one while putting your focus on another thing.

Your mind is designed to focus on one thing at a time and when you are continually being distracted you are going to be inefficient and make more mistakes.

Check out this clip from the documentary Captivated by Media Talk 101 The Myth of Multitasking

Imagine for a moment that you woke up one morning and you noticed that your fingers felt numb. At first you may not think much about it, “Maybe I just slept on my arm and cut off the circulation.” By lunchtime you are starting to get concerned because now the numbness has crept up your forearm, so you decide to go see a doctor.

The doctor seems concerned and conducts a simple test by pinching your arm, but you don’t even flinch. He tries another spot and pinches your arm again, but you don’t react. “Did you feel that?” the doctor asks. “No,” is your reply. At that moment do you think he’s going to say, “Congratulations! We’ve just discovered that you must be an emerging superhero! You have a special superpower; you don’t feel pain!”? No!

Actually, he would be alarmed and begin to order further tests and send you to a specialist to get to the bottom of the problem.

YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM

If you were a comic book superhero, it would not be shocking in the least if you had a resistance to pain, but since you are not a superhero, it should be alarming. You see, your body has a nervous system which does a lot of things and one of those things it does well is to produce pain. Most people don’t like pain (and for good reason) but pain is a built in alert system to help protect your body from further harm.

Not only do you have a physical nervous system, you also have a spiritual nervous system which is called your conscience. One of the things your conscience is supposed to do is help you discern good from bad by giving you warning signs when something’s not right. It is supposed to produce spiritual pain when your heart and mind are exposed to things that can be harmful. How well is your conscience working when it comes to today’s entertainment choices? Can you feel the pinch on the arm?

BECOMING DESENSITIZED

It never ceases to amaze me how many times I’ve heard these famous words, “It doesn’t affect me,” when challenging teens about poor entertainment choices. It is often stated with bold confidence as if possessing a particular gift or talent which allows a person to no longer feel pain. That’s not a good thing, it’s actually a sign of becoming desensitized.

There is an epidemic of people who claim that negative or compromising elements in their media consumption do not influence them. They are people who believe that movies, TV shows, music and video games that glamorize sexual immorality, drug and alcohol abuse, gratuitous violence, anger, hate, despair, suicide, greed, discontentment and many other spiritually and morally destructive themes do not affect them. This is not a sign of superhuman powers but of a heart that is becoming numb, becoming insensitive.

The very fact that someone says it doesn’t affect them is a dead giveaway that they are affected. No longer feeling the pinch, our generation is desensitized and numb. It is the case of a heart that no longer discerns its own corruption. For many, this has become a self-proclaimed badge of honor rather than an alarming concern.

Hebrews 5:14 “But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to distinguish between good and evil.”

What if I told you I would give you a million dollars to have a balanced media diet in your life, would you be motivated?

I don’t think I would have any trouble getting you to sign up for my free online course and take to heart the things you can learn for your own benefit.

But I don’t have a million dollars to give you, so you’ll have to find a different motivation.

WANT TO BE FAMOUS?

What if I told you I could make you famous if you had a balanced media diet?

But I can’t make you famous. Money and fame are misdirected values in our culture today.

In order to define the right goals, you need to have the right values. How do you define values?

HOW TO DEFINE VALUES

Here’s a simple question to help get to a meaningful definition – what do you value above other things?

For example, do you value having a few deep relationships in your life, or would you rather have 1000 shallow connections to people who don’t really care about you?

If you value having a few deep relationships, then you will have to set goals that will keep you on track so that you don’t waste your limited time and energy cultivating shallow connections instead of deeper relationships.

YOUR VALUES AFFECT YOUR GOALS

There are many more examples that might be used but for now I hope you start to understand that what you value affects the goals you set and the goals you set affect your priorities in life and the choices you make from day to day.