THE PROblem of pride in the age of twitter > BRETT MCCRACKEN DO YOU REMEMBER the ‘80s? Back then we talked on landline phones a few times a day, and occasionally wrote letters. Other than that we were more than satisfied with (gasp!) communicating with people in face-to-face, physical spaces—we were even OK with the limitations of distance and time. It never really occurred to us that we would want to call someone while driving. In retrospect, those were desperately archaic days. We were suffering under the tyrannies of landlines; we were enslaved by our ignorance of Wi-Fi; we were hopelessly deprived of knowing everything about everyone’s day on a minute-by-minute basis. Not so in the age of Twitter. In our Facebooked world, our lives are being reoriented toward a sort of play-by-play, all pervasive communication rhythm in which very little is private anymore. The birth of the Internet started us on this track—introducing us to the concept of instant informationgratification. We can get whatever we want, whenever we want it, with nothing but an Internet hookup standing in our way. We’ve become addicted to a strange sort of connectivity—a connectivity that maintains a comfortable balance between distance and proximity, anonymity and overexposure. We’ve become addicted to hyper-controlled, selfBRETT MCCRACKEN has an MA in cinema and media studies from UCLA. He is managing editor for Biola University magazine and is currently working on a book about Christian hipsters.
appointed, “just how I like it” communication. In this McDonald’s-meets-Macintosh world, we’re endowed with the ability to be even more self-obsessed than ever before. How self-absorbed have we become? We have our blogs, our YouTube channels, our MySpace and Facebook pages, our personalized desktops with tailor-made “favorites,” our hand-picked TiVo television schedules, our personalized ringtones, AIM icons, video game avatars, and the list goes on. We can create our “self” to be whatever we want it to be in the digital world—which is increasingly the world we inhabit. I’m not saying these are bad technologies or that we’d be better off back in time a few decades. I’m just suggesting that these technologies are, strikingly and swiftly, changing the way we conceive of ourselves: as fluid, adaptable, hypertext HTML bodies with the ability to cut, paste, copy or delete anything about ourselves at any time. This is a problem. It creates a new frontier of self-entitlement for a generation that is already way too self-entitled. Not only has the Internet made it easy for us to find and see whatever we want, but it’s also become strikingly simple to be whoever we want. We’ve become obsessed with “status,” but not status in the sense of being objectively measurable (as in our vital stats) or community-derived (as in our class or social status), but status in the attentiondeficit sense of “what I am doing right now.” Communication is no longer about learning things from people or sharing experiences; it’s about knowing what they’re doing and how they’re feeling—or at least how they want the world to perceive them as such. Our lives have suddenly become much more dramatic, worthy of being “performed” on a stage visible to millions. But since when are our lives so interesting that we feel compelled to share them with the world? Do we have delusions of grandeur? Perhaps it’s not primarily the fact that we can tell our stories to the world, but that—more so than ever before—we desperately long to. There is a real sense of emptiness in this generation. We’ve grown up in relative
stability and lived borderline boring lives. For most of us, no major wars, crises, famines or holocausts have plagued our lives. Meanwhile, we’ve consumed more media than ever—living in movies, television shows, video games and other fantasy worlds. There’s been a dissonance between who we are (boring, unknown) and what the media has made us want to be (interesting, glamorous, famous). The result is a massive cultural longing to be known. Not by a few, but by many. Author and Berkeley journalism professor Rebecca Solnit described “the great struggle in our time” as being “the endeavor to become a producer of meanings rather than a consumer of them.” We’re a generation exhausted by consumerism, and yet it’s all we really know. Our impulse now is to do something other than take from culture; we desperately seek to contribute—to be significant. Blogs give us this chance, and so does YouTube, and Twitter, and Facebook, and the rest. Suddenly we have things to say and— more importantly—people who are listening. But these ways of “reaching out” or “giving back” to culture are still predominantly about me. About how I find meaning by bouncing ideas off of the wider web world. About feeling important, validated, useful, interesting. It appears that ultimately we’re retreating further inward, to the “i” world of our personal computing universe. Under the guise of increasing our levels of connectivity, these technologies are ultimately just tools to help us isolate, insulate and unshackle from the outmoded constraints of having to answer to anyone other than ourselves. What does the Church—an institution birthed in and bound up within community—do in such a hyper-individualized tech landscape? How can we minister to one another if we’re constantly preoccupied with our own selfstyled status? How can we understand what it means to be the unified body of Christ if we encourage our members to retreat to their iSelf tech bubbles to “express themselves” rather than urging them to put down the mouse, tone down the texting and get their physical bodies into a small group? The problem of self-entitlement (or pride, to be more direct) is a familiar one for the Church, and technology has only exacerbated it. In times like these—when it’s easier and more alluring than ever to be or feel important—Christians must remember that we’re not called to be viral superstars, we’re called to be living sacrifices. We’re not instructed to make ourselves look as good as possible in front of the largest audience we can; no, we are instructed to deny ourselves and humbly follow Christ. d
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