Courtney McGrail“This place diminishes us all,” wrote Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson of Twitter just over a week back.
Announcing after a row with a colleague and following yet another interminable barrage of abuse from people who had found his politics insufficiently ‘pure’ for their purposes that he would be quitting the social media platform, he said: “Well, I’ve had fun ranting for the last few years, and I hope you’ve found it amusing, but I can feel my soul withering within me each time I enter another dialogue of the deaf.”
He has since come back, as those who depart Twitter so often do, but his final words – “it’s been fun, folks, but whatever it’s been it hasn’t been real” – will have echoed loudly for many online, especially for those who had but recently pondered Andrew Sullivan’s extraordinary nymag.com piece ‘I used to be a human being’.
Sullivan had famously been a pioneering politics blogger (dish.andrewsullivan.com), whose life for a decade and a half was a constant “immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news”. As time went on, he writes, others had embraced this life on a mass scale, with Facebook, Twitter, smartphones and a range of apps combining to drown people in “a deluge of febrile content”.
“It was ubiquitous now, this virtual living, this never-stopping, this always-updating,” he writes.
Capacity
Describing how he was losing the capacity to read in a deep way, to engage in arguments without his mind flickering elsewhere, he observes that while much of online life is inevitable, it is also all too easily corrosive, and admits that he had “been engaging – like most addicts – in a form of denial”.
Recognising that multitasking is “a mirage” – and this is something that studies constantly point out – he moved within a few months from one extreme to another, quitting online interaction and checking into a meditation centre, where in the silence he felt time slow, and learned to appreciate the joy of being present, whether to others or simply to himself.
In his book A Secular Age, he writes, the philosopher Charles Taylor describes how our world has not gone from faith to secularism in one go, or through argument, but simply through making ideas and practices seem less relevant.
“The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith,” he writes, “is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn.”
The essay is long, but fascinating and important, and readers would do well to find it, print it and then slowly chew it over at their leisure.
While Sullivan says the online world has costs, he also acknowledges that it is a world with real rewards, and also quite bluntly the world in which so many of us live – Pope Emeritus Benedict described it as no longer a tool but an environment – and indeed are to some degree obliged to live now. As such, it’s worth considering how this world can best be navigated.
In an article in catholicworldreport.com, New Jersey deacon Steven Greydanus, considers how we can ‘Beware the (online) culture of wrath’. For Greydanus, creator of decentfilms.com, Time magazine wasn’t wrong when it opined “we’re losing the internet to a culture of hate”, but he sees this as something to be tackled and moderated, rather than – save for those who need a clean break – simply fled.
Considering how cultures of wrath can be spread online, he argues for people getting to know their “social media temperature”, and outlines a few pointers to help people live better online.
“Our mission to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world is as pressing in the world of social media as it is anywhere,” he writes, continuing, “Amid the darkness of online wrath and outrage, be a beacon of something better. The soul you save could be your own.”