Any parent of teenagers can tell you that the deepest, most expansive, and heart changing conversations you can have with your kid (in this case, about social media) will probably happen in the sleepy hours between 10 and midnight. It is a whole different type of newborn wakefulness. They have a lot to say, and a lot of questions- questions that will often confound you both- as their brains expand into adulthood and they really start to consider their own place in that world.
Such was a conversation we recently had. It probably started with something innocuous, as it usually does- but then somehow that turned into a deep discussion about a particular set of YouTube ‘celebrities’ who were just, well, oversharing and awful. Horror was expressed by all of us about a particular YouTuber that was going so far as to share when her twelve year old daughter started her period. Both of my kids were expressing how awful it was that this daughter had no control over what her parents were sharing, and what a huge invasion of privacy it was. The conversation continued to delve deeper into this sort of ‘reality tv’ culture- both in social media and in the more traditional forms of media. We discussed shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians and the Duggar family, Teenage and Pregnant, Dance Moms.
The basic running questions was- well what do you do about it?– when media is just chockablock with these types of viral yuck.
It made me think of my own teenage and early adulthood, and how things felt then with media. I told them how media of the type they were discussing was nascent mostly on MTV- and how back then the Discovery Channel was actually a sort of learning channel. There was no social media to speak of. But then as we all hit our early twenties, blogging as a media form exploded- then Facebook- then Instagram, and so on. And I think we all-unused to such media in a new form- overshared constantly. In a way, we didn’t know any better. There was such novelty in being able to share our lives with our friends and family in a new way, and very few of us actually stopped to think about just how far our online reach actually was, and what dark corners of the internet our thoughts and images could show up in. And then suddenly people started to make money off of this media, just by ‘sharing their lives’- and the influencer culture was born. That horrifically muddied the waters even further, and again, very few of us actually stopped to think about the commodification of both ourselves and our children, especially.
As I was sharing my perspective with my teens, I also noted how so many of us in my generation have also taken a huge step back from social media and online life in recent years. It feels like a lot of us elder Millennials just completely burnt out on the constant forces of ‘share more’ in internet and algorithm land. And yes- a lot of us had a reckoning too, where we realized that we had overshared far too much, we hadn’t protected our children’s dignity- well, to be frank, we hadn’t even respected our own dignity. My private internet archive is much larger than my online presence now: nearly two thirds of this blog is archived- my Instagram feed, which held some 3500(!) posts, now shows less than a hundred. While I do have a Facebook account, I never use it anymore, and it’s mostly stuck there because no matter how many times I deactivate it, it will, like a zombie, appear again without my knowledge, reactivated by Facebook itself. I don’t have Twitter/X. My Pinterest lies dormant. No Snapchat. No TikTok.
My whole engagement with the online world has massively shifted, and my ‘rules of engagement’ in the media world have gotten more and more defined with each passing year. But how do you translate this in a conversation with teens? I went to bed praying and thinking about it, and here I am now, articulating it in written form.
Respect the dignity of yourself and the person on the other side of the screen; in a word, be hospitable in how you view others in the online space.
I’ve found this concept to be difficult personally. What is wise to share? What is not? Am I adding to the online conversation or detracting from it? Does what I’m posting respect the dignity of my personhood, made in the image of God, and does it respect those around me as well, such as my children and my spouse? I think this looks different for every person. It gets especially sticky when we come to ‘making money online’, which so many of us do, in different forms. There has to be a question in there, somehow, of whether how we are making that money turns ourselves and our children into a mechanistic construct, a means to an end- because that means we’ve crossed that line of recognizing the icon of God and making cheap idols and imitations of true personhood.
I appreciated the words of Denise Trull at Theology of Home, on Honoring the Mystery:
“The Desert Fathers continually tell us to protect that mystery in one another. Not to pry or to satisfy a vain curiosity about each other. Not to assume any motives, or judge too harshly, or give unasked for advice. Not to watch too carefully for secrets that we should not be privy to unless they are revealed in trust. We are admonished to stay within our own ‘hermitage’ and not go gadding about looking for the sensational in someone else’s home. We are to protect one another’s autonomous beauty with humble discretion. We are to honor the mystery.”
To me, this strikes as two-fold- we protect the mystery of our own home/hermitage and not share things that should stay hidden, but also that we respect and protect the mystery and dignity of others, even if they aren’t doing that for themselves- and this is what strikes at the question my teens were asking. What do you do when you are constantly bombarded with media that is well, unholy? Undignified? We choose hospitality. In this I mean that we respect the dignity of the human behind the screen. If it is unholy, undignified, lacking virtue- we look away. So much of viral culture is a pursuit of controversy- each person more over the top than the next. If more of us would choose the simple act of looking away, the algorithm would shift quickly. But we don’t- because there is some very human, feral desire to know what is going on. It’s like rubberneckers in a car crash.
We can choose to carefully curate what media we are consuming in an online space. Sure, the algorithm will try to bump it, but staying within the limits we have set for ourselves- sticking close to our chosen subscriptions on YouTube, for example, and not just letting it wildly feed us whatever it will. We can choose what we look towards.
St. Basil the Great writes of bees visiting flowers as an example of how we should wisely approach what we take in:
“For these neither approach all flowers equally, nor in truth do they attempt to carry off entire those upon which they alight, but taking only so much of them as is suitable for their work, they suffer the rest to go untouched. We ourselves too, if we are wise, having appropriated from this literature [media] what is suitable to us and akin to the truth, will pass over the remainder.”
Is it true? Is it good? Is it beautiful? Most importantly, does it inform our virtue or detract from it?
Social media, while presented in a new technological form, is not new. It is a society of persons interacting, just as we do in the real world, with all its inherent benefits and dangers. What makes social media worse is how it dehumanizes us- how it separates our mind from our bodies. There is something about the real life world and having to look another human in the face when we say something harsh, discordant, rude, or cruel that may stop us entirely from falling into sin, zipping our mouth shut, causing us to reconsider. This ‘gate’ of visually and incarnationally engaging with another human is lost in the online space, and we ‘say’ what we will without ever considering our tongues at all, cogs in a machine meant to dehumanize us further.
The utterly mechanistic, dehumanizing view of consumerism further erodes our concept of what is good, and acceptable, and what is not. I have said many times to my children that the reason certain online spaces continue to exist- why certain ‘celebrities’ continue to be platformed- any number of viral and controversial things- is simply because they are lucrative. They make money. And as long as the money is there, it is very, very hard to turn away from it and say I will no longer do this, say this, whatever it might be- because loss of money to many is akin to loss of freedom. But we very rarely inquire as to what we are enslaved to when we make choices to not respect the dignity of ourselves and others.
I’d like to point you to an entry of Bethany Joy’s substack, entitled “Becoming the Stranger”. The whole piece is well worth a read, but I specifically caught hold of her description of a workshop she recently attended, where her friend, Dr Jeffery Bilbro, had given a talk. She says:
“…I had been delighted to hear Dr. Trueman uphold hospitality as a crucial response to ‘the desecration of the human person.’ Trueman outlined three broad [rejections] working to undermine the image of God: rejection of limits, rejection of ends (i.e. rejection of the idea that things have a purpose), and rejection of natural obligations.”
She goes on to detail:
“In the ancient world—including the biblical world—hospitality was always understood as a practice of mutual obligation. A host welcomed a guest with care, even reverence, because he knew that he or his children might one day be strangers in need of welcome. We hear this in the words of Deuteronomy 10:18-19: “[The Lord] executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.”
In the end- hospitality in the online space means a practice of mutual obligation-
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40)
Loving our neighbor in the online space may often look different than we traditionally think of hospitality and of service: so often I think it’s more akin to Noah’s sons, when, upon realizing his nakedness and drunkenness, walked backward into the tent to cover him with his cloak, respecting his dignity, even when he had forgotten his own. I don’t think this means that we don’t call out unholy and undignified speech in the online public space (or the real world, for that matter)- but what should always be at the forefront of those interactions is the love Christ exhorts us to. That we choose mercy and grace and justice. But a lot of the time, especially for children and teens, we also need to remind them that we don’t have to look. We can ‘walk away’ and/or carry the cloak in backwards with our eyes focused on Christ, and not what is being presented to us.
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I am indebted to Haley Baumeister, who collated and curated many of the articles I used to think about this topic in her Week 16 (2024) collection, and also to Autumn Kern, whose entire Season 3 of the Common Mom podcast contributed to my thoughts here, but especially Episode 7, where she discusses St. Basil the Great, St. Thomas of Aquinas, and G.K. Chesterton: The Sacramental Imagination. I’d recommend both as resources to you if you want to consider this more in depth for your own children. There’s also a short film, in German (with English subtitles) that I hope illustrates the issue at hand. It’s called Nelly’s Story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbcEFMp8xl0
Tell me what's on your heart~