Lonely? Get connected. Bored? Get connected. Want to be entertained? Get connected. Want artistic inspiration? Get connected.
The call to connections is great, the net it casts is wide, and those who answer its call are numbered in the billions. Social media is one of the technologies which has had the greatest impact, as well as the greatest harm.
Former heads of Facebook, former programmers, and others have lined up to express chagrin and outrage at the devastation it has caused. They express sorrow at what they've done to our culture, and admit it was done with the sole desire to make money. That desire has not diminished with time and seems to be swelling.
We "feel" connected, but are we really? Studies show that around 85% of communication is nonverbal, which means we are only using 15% capacity when just typing in words. Sure, that's why they invented emoji and web slang, but how many times have you used "lol" without really laughing out loud? And how many times have you made sure only the photos most favorable to you made it to your FB page? Lying isn't just about not telling the truth. It can also be about withholding information.
And social media isn't just about helping you make friends. It's about collecting information in order to sell it to other corporations. The New York Times had an article entitled, "What 7 Creepy Patents Reveal About Facebook," which reports that despite Facebook's public commitment to collecting personal information, the patents show a desire to (1) read your relationships to detect patterns in gender; (2) classify your personality to use the personality traits to their advantage; (3) predict future events such as births, graduations, or other life events through your posts and messages; (4) identify your camera through faulty pixels or lens scratches to discover your relationship with others and those with whom you share pictures; (5) listen to the environment around you that your cellphone microphone picks up in order to identify what you watch, thus correlating your media consumption data with your user profiles; (6) track your routines and send notifications to other users of deviations from that routine, as well as collecting data on your cellphone's location in the middle of the night to establish your place of residency; (7) track where you go to establish patterns of where you spend the most time and how many hours you spend at each place.
All this is part of what Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard calls "Surveillance Capitalism," where using electronics to gather data on specific individuals in order to sell it to other companies is the goal. It is not general data concerning demographics or wide populations, but specific data tied only to you. Almost every large tech corporation is involved in it, from Google, to Facebook, to Twitter, to Apple, and many, many more.
The Smartphone: Imagine just sitting on the couch and doing nothing but thinking...
If you have a smartphone in your pocket, sitting around and doing nothing but thinking deep thoughts probably isn't very high on your priority list. Or is it on the list at all?
Alas, some claim the depth of intellectual thought conveyed on through the smartphone is a mile wide and an inch deep. I'm not convinced they're terribly wrong. The smartphone is designed for quick: quick conversations, quick texts, quick weather checks, quick photos, quick map checks, quick directions, but, okay, loooooong stays on tiktok, instagram (who said the "insta" stood for instant?), pinterest, facebook, youtube, snapchat, whatsapp, zoom, houseparty, netflix, minecraft, PUBG, candy crush, among us, and hundreds other social media apps.
The problem isn't the smartphone itself, it's all the apps that come with it. Don't be fooled, the makers of the smartphones are co-conspirators, but the reason a smartphone will do 1000 things that you want it to, feel like you need it to, feel like you have to have it do, is because the more time you spend on your smartphone, the more information they can gather about you that can be turned into money from knowing what you buy or the locations you visit or who your friends are or who you spend the most time with or any other detail that they can sell. You can go to places like your Google account and turn off lots of things, but they can still track you (even when you have apps turned off) and while they say no person reads your emails their software sifts through it looking for what you buy and from whom and any other activity they think will help them analyze and influence you by. There's no need for a "big brother" government, we already have "big brother" corporations.
The equation is simple: the longer they can keep you on the phone, the more information they can collect, and the more money they can make through having your information. Do they care that studies show the more time you spend on the smartphone the more likely you are to have eye strain, back and neck pain, wrist pain, anxiety, impaired sleep, acquired ADHD, be depressed, emotionally harmed, or mentally unstable, and the affect on children is even exponential, causing their brains not to develop properly? The answer is a resounding, "No." After all, the more time you spend on their apps, the more money they make. It's why I often say if you want to know why things are the way they are, "Follow the money!" and why Paul wrote, "the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil" (1 Timothy 6:10), even though it isn't the root of all evil.
