The above title was on a post from a few years ago. I was warning so often about Facebook a decade ago that I thought about naming Wednesday posts......Facebook Wednesdays. My primary concern was what it did to Christians....who were absolutely wasting their time on this innocuous pursuit....building up their own image....sometimes falsely....coming into bondage from this social media that itself was built on the most unChristian of concepts....while watching Zuckerberg in action.....and knowing that this will surely lead to disaster in anything it touched. I questioned back then how a pastor could warn about Facebook.....when his own church had a Facebook page?
I posted back in 2010....."The narcissism, the pursuit of the trivial and the super-willingness to taste every grape dangled over the mouth is only part of the problem with this juggernaut of technological innovation in social networking. There is a tapeworm growing in this frenzy for technological gimmicks. Every gimmick is a tentacle, every hour spent on it is literally wasted when one considers that the nation's code of ethics is in critical condition. Will this one day become a cyber-bulimia where one throws up and then waits only long enough to catch a breath before devouring more? The welfare of the people does not come into play with Facebook execs, only the desires of the people [to which] they are more than happy to prescribe steroids."
I posted back in 2010....."The narcissism, the pursuit of the trivial and the super-willingness to taste every grape dangled over the mouth is only part of the problem with this juggernaut of technological innovation in social networking. There is a tapeworm growing in this frenzy for technological gimmicks. Every gimmick is a tentacle, every hour spent on it is literally wasted when one considers that the nation's code of ethics is in critical condition. Will this one day become a cyber-bulimia where one throws up and then waits only long enough to catch a breath before devouring more? The welfare of the people does not come into play with Facebook execs, only the desires of the people [to which] they are more than happy to prescribe steroids."
And I posted this a year later...."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. (it's almost three billion converts today!) 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."
And I posted this in 2015...."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. Should not our prayer be Humble us Lord. Spare your rod if it be yours to show us mercy? 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. Maybe this question should be asked..."How much time do we, as a people, spend on Facebook alone as opposed to time spent in God's Word to us?" Would not the answer incriminate us? I have to believe that if every minute spent on Facebook were to be on our knees then mercy might just be given us."
An this also from 2015...."American conservatives and especially Christians should have recognized Facebook for what it is long ago but the opposite has happened as otherwise wonderful national ministries gleefully remind us to follow them on Facebook! This is an issue that should be front and center with conservatives but it would require 'sacrifice' to take a stand. 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! It may not be the greatest tool ever used against America but it's close.....Facebook.....and social media in general. It has become a monster given life by our necessity to view ourselves as something special and our persistence in trivializing life itself: It feeds on our egos. Calling it a Trojan Horse does not do justice. We dragged it in and in return it attacks our discernment therefore it idles us."
And this from December of 2017....."this from a Drudge Report article titled....."Former Facebook exec: Social media is ripping apart society." The exec is the former vice president for user growth Chamath Palihapitiya. According to the article he feels "tremendous guilt" for ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. Here's a direct quote...."The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we've created [including the hearts, likes, and thumbs up of various social media channels] are destroying how society works......[There's] no civil discourse, no cooperation; [only] misinformation, mistruth." Sound familiar? (I was alluding to Donald Trump here)
Continuing here from that same 2017 post...."Sean Parker, the founding and former president of Facebook, recently gave in an interview. The article, on The Drudge Report right now, is titled 'Sean Parker unloads on Facebook "exploiting" human psychology. Parker alludes to his part in a "small group of insider voices exposing and criticizing Silicaon Valley's operations" and also the "rising debate about the power and effects of social networks." He cautions..."It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other...It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains." In summary and looking back at his part in Facebook he laments..."We understood this consciously. And we did it anyway."
