Saturday, 8pm, I’m in crowded Midway airport in Chicago, standing at gate B20, waiting to board a Southwest flight for St. Louis. People watching, I survey the row of seats closest to me. Everyone has their faces in their phones. The next row is about 75 percent faces in phones.
My barber is a sincere Christian and a big time Trumper. Watching News Max got him pumped up. I told him, yes, there is some truth in some things he was bringing up but, no, I do not put those specifics together the same way Trumpers do. He smilingly responded that I’m naïve.
Have you had this experience, you google something and soon you’re getting pop-ups about similar products? In like fashion, I have the app “Smart News” and like it. There are certain topics I follow and, voila! “Because you follow…” pops up. Or the Wizard of Oz behind the screen tells me, “Your screen time was up 42% last week” or down.
“Social psychology exploits predictable forms of irrationality to ‘nudge’ subjects in particular directions, whether online, at work or in public policy.” So wrote Professor Tamsin Shaw in a review of “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World” by Max Fisher. The book “should obliterate any doubts about the significance of algorithmic intervention in human affairs.” I can’t understand what an algorithm is, but I don’t need to understand it. We do need to see the effects upon us. “The enjoyment of moral outrage is one of the key sentiments Fisher sees being exploited by Google (for YouTube) and Meta (for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), which discovered they could monetize this impulse by having their algorithms promote hyperpartisanship. Divisiveness drives engagement, which in turn drives advertising revenues” (New York Times Book Review; September 11, page 11).
We’re being manipulated, some succumbing more than others, but we’re all being lured to follow something that will benefit someone or some corporation that doesn’t care about you or me. Though digital tech is new, this is an old problem. “I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions” (Romans 8:14-15). Paul is talking about the contest within him, within us, between doing what God wants and what sin wants. For Christians, manipulation by social media is a place of spiritual warfare. Think about it.
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