‘Image is everything, and social media is where we craft the spectacle of ourselves.’[1]
Unlike traditional media, social media allows us not only to behold images but to be beheld as an image. It encourages us to project our curated selves for societal validation. How does this intrinsic dynamic of social media form us?
In what follows, I consider the impact of social media on the church’s teens. It is safe to say that the generation who grew up with the digital world as the norm is most susceptible to its formative influences.
1. Understanding social media
Six decades ago, Marshall McLuhan wrote, ‘the medium is the message’.[3] In other words, the media we use to communicate isn’t neutral. The media we use influences what we communicate and even who we become. Likewise, social media isn’t neutral. To understand how so, we need to understand social media as a medium first.
When the worldwide web was first introduced in 1995, content creation was in the hands of a special few. The vast majority who engaged with the world wide web were consumers of content. Even if individuals created personal web pages, these were static pages. Communication was directed from web creator to web consumer only. This was the era of Web 1.0.
However, with the arrival of Web 2.0, the world wide web became thoroughly social. Websites became dynamic real-time communication tools in which users could participate. Content generation was no longer the work of a few. Users were no longer merely consumers of content but also producers. As content production became democratised, anyone could say anything and everyone could access it – not the best news for parents or pastors.
Ultimately, Web 2.0 provided the infrastructure for the ‘widespread adoption of social media… in the years between 2009-2012’.[4] With social media, one was not just a producer of content – one projected the content of one’s self for the consumption and review of others (through likes, comments, and number of views etc.). While humans have always craved social approval, social media gave tangible real-time parameters to that approval mechanism. The incessant social approval conditions us to feed on ‘regular micro-bursts of validation given by every like, favorite, retweet, or link’.[5]
So how has social media’s well-oiled mechanisms impacted the youth of today?
Below I highlight just one – loneliness.
Jean Twenge argues that “behaviors and emotional traits of children and teens began to change abruptly in 2011, when the majority of Americans started to own mobile phones with Internet access”.[6] In particular, she notes that feelings of loneliness amongst this generation have increased dramatically since 2011.
And the impact is not limited to the US or the West. In 2022, Twenge, alongside other experts in the field, wrote the journal article, Worldwide increases in adolescent loneliness. The paper finds that ‘School loneliness increased from 2012–2018 in 36 out of 37 countries.’ They conclude that this is ‘in conjunction with the rise of smartphone access and increased internet use, though causation cannot be proven…’[7]
The irony is that even though today’s adolescents are super-connected, they don’t actually feel more connected.
2. Understanding expressive individualism
Yet, while the medium is indeed the message, the medium does also carry a message – that of expressive individualism.[8]
Increasingly, Western culture has been described with the term expressive individualism. But what is it? This idea is that each person has a deep, unique inner self that needs to be expressed in order for one to realise one’s self. It involves discovery (of one’s self) on one hand and projection (of one’s self on society) on the other. While Scripture reminds us that our identity is received in Christ (Gal 2:20; Col 3:3), expressive individualism tells us that identity formation is seen as a personal project.
This sounds abstract but consider the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body”. Such an idea would have sounded deeply puzzling to most in the past. Today in the West, however, people who don’t agree with it are often called bigots. Why?
This kind of statement can only make sense in a society whose values have shifted dramatically toward expressive individualism – the idea that being true to yourself is the highest good. It seems to me that this shift has been accelerated by the use of social media.
3. Understanding social media as the tool for expressive individualism
While this mindset has deep roots in Western thinking, it has become far more widespread in recent years. In particular, it seems to me that the last decade (or so) of widespread social media adoption has greatly facilitated it.[9] In social media, expressive individualism has found its perfect medium. How does this play out?
First, social media provides the platform for the articulation of one’s own identity to the world in real-time.
Second, this individuality is realized through social approval – the ‘likes’, comments, and the number of views of one’s projected self.
Third, because content creation is now in the hands of many, the young and impressionable can easily find role models of expressive individualism to emulate (read: influencers).
On the impact social media influencers have had on the young and vulnerable, consider the following poignant phenomenon:
According to Abigail Shrier, the 2010s saw a major increase in the number of high school students in the West identifying as transgender (‘gender dysphoria’). Notably, most of those who sought gender treatment were teenage girls.[10] How did this happen?
Shrier argues that online role models have a big part to play. In particular, she argues that ‘female-to-male influencers with huge followings’ have espoused gender transition as the cure for whatever mental health struggles or anxieties a particular adolescent girl might be facing.
Conclusion
This is not a call to flee but to be watchful. Neither is it the full picture of social media. Many have leveraged its reach to share the love of Christ to others. Nonetheless, if we are to cultivate godliness in this digital age, we must be aware of the formative forces at work in social media.
So, how has social media formed you?
[1] Tony Reinke, Competing Spectacles: Treasuring Christ in the Media Age.
[2] This is not to say that other generations are left unaffected by its influence but to we want to consider the issue first from those most affected. Note also that this pastoral perspective is adapted from a piece I wrote in TTC, called Social Media, Expressive Individualism and The Church’s Vulnerable Young. If you would like to read the essay, feel free to email me.
[3] This is from his seminal book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
[4] Teen Mental Health Is Plummeting, and Social Media is a Major Contributing Cause: Hearing at Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Technology, Privacy, and the Law (2022).
[5] Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You.
[6] Jean Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood (and What That Means for the Rest of Us). In the book Twenge defined iGen as the generation born between 1995 (the year the internet was introduced, hence the ‘i’) and 2012.
[7] Jean M. Twenge et al., “Worldwide Increases in Adolescent Loneliness”. Further, they note, ‘Worldwide, nearly twice as many adolescents in 2018 (vs. 2012) had elevated levels of school loneliness’
[8] There are, of course, limits to this generalisation. The extent to which we are westernised is the extent that expressive individualism plays in our psyche. Likewise, this article is also limited by its focus on western phenomena. Nonetheless, my hope is that the article will serve to understand this stream of influence coming from the West, which as far as I can tell, is the main stream on our church’s youth.
[9] Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. Distilling centuries of intellectual history into 400 pages, Trueman, an esteemed church historian, conceives of the book in 4 parts. Each part builds on the previous to illustrate the momentous thinkers (from Nietzsche to Marcuse) and their thoughts in the lead-up to The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
[10] Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. She writes that in 2010, only 0.01% in the US identified as transgender. In 2020, however, 2% of all high school students, identify as transgender. Shrier explains that this crisis affects girls more: ‘Between 2016 and 2017, a number of gender surgeries for natal females in the U.S. quadrupled with biological women suddenly accounting for, as we have seen, 70% of all gender surgeries. In 2018, the UK reported 4400% rise over the previous decade in teenage girls seeking gender treatment. In Canada, Sweden, Finland, and the UK, clinicians and gender therapists began reporting a sudden and dramatic shift in the demographics of those presenting with gender dysphoria from predominantly school-aged boys to predominantly adolescent girls.’
