We Are Afraid Of Losing That Which We Never Should Have Begun

Update....January 28: Social media....(of which the following post is about)....is behind the Wall Street 'short selling' news that has dominated over the last few days. Large investment firms have the ability to....'borrow'....some stocks from brokerage houses....in which they pay a small fee....and will have to return the borrowed stock. They sell the stock that they do not even own....expecting that it will drop.....whereas they can buy it back....(at a lower price)....in order to return it to the brokerage house that is holding the stock for someone else not even aware of what is going on....thus making some money on the whole deal. If the stock actually goes up.....which it does at times....the original plan of 'short selling' to make some money....was a bust. In this case today....a group of small investors....knowing that this goes on....banded together on a social media site....with a plan of their own. That small group turned into a very large group....to individually buy the stock....thus driving the price of the stock which a year ago was $4....to well over $400 at one point! This was turning out to be a billion dollar plus loss for those who borrowed the stock to begin with. It actually gets worse....and is not over....but my point is focusing in on the powers of social media....which at times has started revolutions.....helped get a man elected president....and then was partially responsible for getting the same man impeached. What might be next?

We Are Afraid Of Losing That Which We Never Should Have Begun

            I have warned against Facebook almost the entirety of these posts....the message primarily being....God Does Not Need Facebook....and that it only feeds our narcissism and ultimately destroys our discernment....nor does He need Twitter nor Parlor nor Instagram. In fact He does not need the world wide web....for His platform is a pulpit....whether that pulpit be in a sanctuary or our homes or the forests....His text is the Bible....and His algorithms are the Holy Spirit. Should He will it....we would get all the information that we need.....with or without digital information. Here is some of what I have posted over the years:

This from 2018....I've written quite a number of times for almost the entire near ten years of these posts on the dangers of social media. Conservative talk radio is now ranting on it but whereas I pointed to the mounting evidence on the deleterious effects of it on the mind....which affected the direction of the country....talk radio....having been awakened by big tech bias against conservatives....is focused on the structure....not the concept. Now there is talk about a conservative social media....just for us....same mind-numbing social media....only we direct the bias this time.

These are from April of 2017..... 

I have over two decades of Tabletalks stacked in my basement and received the latest issue yesterday but I think that it is well past time for Ligonier and other excellent Christian ministries to get off of Facebook and thereby send a strong message and warning to Christians. (if they had done this we would not be concerned today about getting kicked off)

Pastors sure can't preach against Facebook because they have their own Facebook page. What are national ministries gonna do....warn us on their Facebook page? We don't want controversy and we don't want to be warned. We want gentle encouragement or we'll go somewhere else. This generation....I'm not talking about just baby boomers or millennials or any other ten year grouping....I'm referring to all of us right now....we have not only sat and watched the downfall of America....we ushered it in. We filled our mind with every conceivable entertainment such that it is nearly impossible to have discernment.

God is indeed in control. We are so sure of that that we tuned Him out. He has warned us so much that one would have to wear blinders and cover their ears not to be aware of it. He is at the door and we are in our PJs sitting on the couch watching American Idol. Folks, it's bad and it's going to get a lot worse...put that on your Facebook page and see how many 'likes' you get. 

Have you ever just sat down and thought about what Satan might possibly come up with if he wanted to somnabulize the entire world? Well....you don't have to...he already did! Have you  considered....even for a moment or two....the potential tyranny for such a monolithic entity that Facebook has become? So what can we do? Nothing....sorry to say.....absolutely nothing.....except avoid it....not be a part of it. But alas there are so many good things associated with Facebook! Let me count them....hmmm....OK there's nothing good about it. But what about the person who may come across Ligonier Ministries through Facebook where they might never have encountered the gospel elsewhere? OK....so the world is awash in a narcissistic trance through Facebook but a number of people get saved....even Donald Trump wouldn't go for a deal like that!  You are essentially telling me....are you not....that God could not find those people without Facebook? God whittled 32,000 of Gideon's men down to 300 but this is different...He needs Facebook.
        
[Many Christian ministries]....share the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ in a marvelous way.....if only that were the extent of it.....but it's not.....it also encourages people to participation in Facebook....and to bring along their children and friends. In other words it perpetuates the problem instead of identifying it and warning of the many and varied potential disastrous consequences to not only individuals but entire nations and the entire world!

This from 2016....I have had a running thread of posts on the topic of Facebook over the years and I critically referenced Facebook many more times. Britain's The Telegraph published an article today in their Technology section by Jane Fae titled 'Facebook is imposing prissy American censorship on the whole rest of the world.' The author wrote that Facebook is attempting to "edit our common history" and follows that with this..."Yet, incredibly for a nation that has so recently focused on 'taking back control' (Brexit), and frets about the loss of Christmas tradition (USA) this issue scarcely registers on the national rageometer." Folks...if we can't say no to something like Facebook now, how are we going to....all of a sudden....protest when the issues begin to dictate our very lives....which is inevitable!

This from 2015....

There has been numerous studies done in many countries on the negative affects that Facebook has on its users, from living in a virtual world, to bullying, to a faux concept of what friendship is, to an epidemic of narcissism, to privacy issues, to urban violence. We are repeatedly warned yet continue to follow the Pied Piper.
      
Today's post is on another article from yesterday's paper. The title in our local newspaper was Facebook to post full news articles.  The latest innovation is called Instant Articles.  Rather than merely giving links (that takes time to load) to news stories, Facebook partnered with a few major news outlets to let them put whole articles on Facebook (that load instantly.) As a result of this, paragons of honest and informative news such as the New York Times, NBC News and the BBC have been chosen to provide the 'news' for tens upon tens of millions of Americans? It appears to be a 'win-win' for Facebook and these nine media outlets. The only losers are the American people, our nation as a whole and freedoms and liberty everywhere. I bring up the problems with Facebook and social media fairly often to friends....and I haven't had many empathetic responses....but I'll end this post with another warning that will probably be ignored........social media dumbs down, tranquilizes and nourishes our already rampant narcissism and is in no small way responsible for the lack of discernment on the part of Christians as to how far America has rebelled against God and how He has been calling us back for decades now with dire warnings of judgement to come.
        

This from 2014....The following is a condensed version of a 2010 book review of Nicolas Carr''s The Shallows....What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains....where Carr begins and ends his book with thoughts on HAL from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The computer's last words were "Dave, my mind is going...I can feel it. I can feel it" as the astronaut disconnected circuits. Carr follows with "I can feel it too. Over the last few years I've had an uncomfortable sense, that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory." 

    
Marshall McLuhan appears throughout the book with warnings from years ago that we would experience the "dissolution of the linear mind and that we were breaking the tyranny of text over our thoughts and senses." Carr says that is no Luddite and points out that because of the Web... "research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes but that this boon comes at a price for it shape (s) the process of thought." 

Since Gutenberg's invention, according to Carr, "the linear, literary mind has been at the center of art, science and society." The "heightened consciousness" of the elite in earlier times and most people in more literate times has devolved into computerized minds today that experience "cognitive overload" from the massive input of semi-related data which eliminates deep thought. Books once "enhanced and refined people's experience of life and of nature," writes Carr, but this is being replaced by "the shallows" as the new technologies can "displace" but not "replace" the written word and linear mind.
          
Allow me a personal comment here in that the proclamation of the Gospel is also effected by the information age in that "decisions for Christ" are all too often mere hyperlinks... just one more piece of data to be stored. The short-term memory of an altar call fails to plow deep in the mind and the heart. 

This from 2012.....Ask the average Christian if they know who William Carey was and most will probably say "no" even though he has had seven colleges named after him around the world and is considered the Father of Modern Missions. He was a cobbler, a shoemaker, who felt the call to take the Gospel to the world, and his story is one of one discouragement after another. He finally arrived in India and it was seven years before he saw his first Hindu convert. 

         
Mark Zuckerberg is infinitely smarter than William Carey for it has only been eight years since he founded Facebook and he already has 900 million converts including 45 million, or almost 4%, of the Indian population.....My nomination for America's zeitgeist is Facebook, the corporate name for acute narcissism. The American zeitgeist as Facebook...cyberspace gold...Silicon Valley tea. Oh, I've heard the defense...it's a great way for mom to keep up with the pictures of the grandchildren and now Facebook is into organ donations, but what has transpired in the last eight years is nothing less than insidious. There was a comic in the newspaper a couple of months ago ...a funeral home with four or five seats taken out of about a hundred and the funeral director remarks, "I can't understand it. He had a thousand Facebook friends." 
         
Friends, the voice I hear from Facebook is not that of a friend. Right from the beginning Facebook was built on sand. It has become a veritable monster with ever growing tentacles. One more segue; a new president is not going to make a difference in a land with whatever our zeitgeist is at this time. As an American and a Christian I have failed. How about you? I look back at my life and I have added to the chaos more than contributed to the well-being of our nation. Even my blogging is tinged with pride. The best thing that I can say about my Christian walk is that my redemption must drive the enemy of Christ mad, for he could not even keep someone such as me...! 

Should not our prayer be...."Humble us Lord....spare your rod if it be your will to show us mercy"....but no...we just want Obama out and a couple of sound Supreme Court Justices and we'll be OK. As desirable as that would be...we would not be OK. There is a more pertinent word than zeitgeist and it is outpouring. An outpouring of God's Spirit upon us is not only what we need, it is our only hope. Should not we be praying for this. 

This From 2011....."Disturbing portrait of the future" is one of the blurb descriptions on the back cover of Sherry Turkle's new book Alone Together....Why We Expect More From Technology And Less From Each Other. Turkle is an M.I.T. professor and a licensed clinical psychologist. Her latest book is, in effect, the third of a trilogy and she has researched this subject for twenty years. She writes that we are living parallel lives in a virtual world and that her research shows that too many people find their online life more satisfying than their actual lives and this might be leading to fully networked lives.....My interest in this book is in the social networking aspect of it. My concern is that a nation, America, about to collapse from ignorance within and enemies without, increases the former and motivates the latter through its inane fascination with Facebook and its equally narcissism inducing cousins. 
       
Turkle is right in that the future is unfolding before us. We have lost the ability to look ahead and to see consequences. She fears for the children who are being weaned on technologies that confuse the virtual with the real. She uses the phrase fully tethered life, and writes that we are too often shattered when unplugged.  
        

And finally this from 2010...."We no longer live in cities and on farms, we now live on the Internet." Those were the words of former Facebook president Sean Parker in the just released film The Social Network. Parker was one of the bad guys in this riveting film on Mark Zuckerberg's founding and building of the phenomenon. I contend that adults today are simply auditing the college lifestyle through Facebook....and proving that they are just as susceptible to a gimmick and a promise that the youth are....only it's not only a four year gig adults are wasting time on. Time may tell whether the deep human need for human friendship pushes Facebook aside and convicts it of being friendship only with oneself. The character who Mark Zuckenbeg is accused of defrauding confronts him at the pre-trial meeting of lawyers with "I'm the only friend that you had." It's more than ironic that this individual with one friend has taught the world how to develop friendships.