I’m thoroughly comfortable with recommending complete abandonment of all the big social media platforms. They destroy tranquility, celebrate purely performative identity gestures, amplify rage, and habituate us to pointless fighting with strangers. If you believe that “receding completely from the algorithmic sphere is often unrealistic,” perhaps you need a conversation with yourself about the meaning of the word “unrealistic.” 

--Alan Jacobs

. . . 

And one of them, who seemed to take offense,

perhaps at being named so squalidly,

struck with his fist at Adam’s rigid belly.

It sounded as if it had been a drum;

and Master Adam struck him in the face,

using his arm, which did not seem less hard,

saying to him: “Although I cannot move

my limbs because they are too heavy, I

still have an arm that’s free to serve that need.”

And he replied: “But when you went to burning,

your arm was not as quick as it was now;

though when you coined, it was as quick and more.”

To which the dropsied one: “Here you speak true;

but you were not so true a witness there,

when you were asked to tell the truth at Troy.”

“If I spoke false, you falsified the coin,”

said Sinon; “I am here for just one crime—

but you’ve committed more than any demon.”

“Do not forget the horse, you perjurer,”

replied the one who had the bloated belly,

“may you be plagued because the whole world knows it.”

The Greek: “And you be plagued by thirst that cracks

your tongue, and putrid water that has made

your belly such a hedge before your eyes.”

And then the coiner: “So, as usual,

your mouth, because of racking fever, gapes;

for if I thirst and if my humor bloats me,

you have both dryness and a head that aches;

few words would be sufficient invitation

to have you lick the mirror of Narcissus.”

I was intent on listening to them

when this was what my master said: “If you

insist on looking more, I’ll quarrel with you!”

And when I heard him speak so angrily,

I turned around to him with shame so great

that it still stirs within my memory.

Even as one who dreams that he is harmed

and, dreaming, wishes he were dreaming, thus

desiring that which is, as if it were not,

so I became within my speechlessness:

I wanted to excuse myself and did

excuse myself, although I knew it not.

Dante's Inferno, Canto XXX (Mendelbaum's translation)

[On] social media today everyone is in a state of high alarm all the time. . . . 

I have come to believe that it is impossible for anyone who is regularly on social media to have a balanced and accurate understanding of what is happening in the world. To follow a minute-by-minute cycle of news is to be constantly threatened by illusion. So I’m not just staying off Twitter, I’m cutting back on the news sites in my RSS feed, and deleting browser bookmarks to newspapers. Instead, I am turning more of my attention to monthly magazines, quarterly journals, and books. I’m trying to get a somewhat longer view of things — trying to start thinking about issues one when some of the basic facts about them have been sorted out. Taking the short view has burned me far too many times; I’m going to try to prevent that from happening ever again (even if I will sometimes fail). And if once in a while I end up fighting a battle in a war that has already ended ... I can live with that.

Alan Jacobs, "Recency Illusions"

Our worship songs are typically celebrative, in both lyrical content and musical expression. In the last generation, a mournful song about crucifixion was pepped up with a jingly-sounding chorus, “It was there by faith I received my sight, and now I am happy all the day!” This isn’t just a Greatest Generation revivalist problem either. Even those ubiquitous contemporary worship songs that come straight out of the Psalms tend to focus on psalms of ascent or psalms of joyful exuberance, not psalms of lament (and certainly not imprecatory psalms!).

We can easily sing with the prophet Jeremiah, “great is thy faithfulness” (Lam. 3:23). But who can imagine singing, in church, with Jeremiah: “You have wrapped yourself with a cloud so that no prayer can pass through. You have made us scum and garbage among all the peoples” (Lam. 3:43-45).

Russell Moore, "Why Social Media (and the Church) Is Making You Sad"

As Sam Gamgee once said, Well, I'm back.

For the last (nearly) three weeks, my wife and I have taken a break from social media. It has been a good experience, and last night I took some time to reflect on it. Here are a few things I learned:

1. During the break, I found that I had a lot less clutter in my mind. I wasn't worrying through the day about depressing national news, Twitter controversies, Facebook rants, or other online annoyances outside my control. And although I was missing some things that I would have been interested in, it was better for a few days to reconnect with a quiet soul.

2. I found that I just don't need to know the day-to-day news from scores of distant friends and organizations. I'm thankful for my friends and for these organizations, but I have only so much mental energy to use each day, and when I see tidbits from scores of people and organizations I follow on Twitter, it takes a cumulative emotional toll. I have enough to think about with my wife and kids, my church friends, my students, and other people in my current situation, so I have taken some time to greatly reduce the number of people/organizations I'm following. The goal is to have a less cluttered mind and a more quiet soul.

3. When I got back online, I was amazed at the amount of outrage on Twitter. People tweet their outrage at this and their outrage about that--social justice causes, etc. Although the causes are often good, it's simply not healthy to constantly be feeding on all this outrage. Simply living a good, virtuous real life is probably a better way to bring about real social change than lots of passionate RTs.

4. Without the option of Twitter or Facebook, I spent more time doing more worthwhile things. I read hundreds of pages. I spent time working on a new online class that I'm teaching. I wrote some poetry. I spent more time in engaged conversation with my wife. I played soccer out in the yard with my kids. Et cetera. This time was much better spent than flipping through my Twitter feed once again.

5. I was reminded that real life doesn't take place online, but in the incarnate world. Stuff on Twitter seems SO IMPORTANT. But I don't need all of it. There was once a day when we just lived our lives instead of tweeting/instagramming/facebooking whatever we were doing. It was nice to reconnect with that world.

In the future, I plan to spend a lot less time on social media, and taking more of these social media fasts. Real life is waiting for me somewhere offline.

Okay, now I'm gonna shut my laptop and go live my life.

The social media world encourages us not to do things for their own sake, but rather for the approval and attention of our burgeoning online audiences. We don’t just read according to the suggestions of others; we don’t just join book clubs. Rather, we Instagram pictures of ourselves reading, join a social network where we can show off our huge bookshelves, and post smart-sounding quotes on Facebook. I’ve done this—perhaps we’ve all done this. The problem is that it uses the author, the book, and the protagonist for our own personal, selfish ends. It makes the book about us, rather than about the story itself.

There’s also the siren call of list-making: we all love watching a list of accomplishments grow and grow. This is perhaps the largest reason I find Goodreads dangerous, personally: it enumerates the books I’ve read, and organizes them into admiration-worthy lengthy lists. It encourages me to look not at the quality of reads, not at the specific beauties of various works, but to admire and venerate the amalgamated monstrous whole. Thus, I begin to rush: I want to finish this book, that book, and the next—not to meet a deadline, necessarily, not because I’m so engrossed in the book I can’t stop—but merely because I want to check another book off my list.

Perhaps, as a writer and occasional book critic, this sort of self-conscious reading will be somewhat inevitable in the future. But . . . [t]here is a beauty to the imagination that deep-reading requires.  Whenever we read for criticism, for an audience, or for the joys (and dangers) of list-making, we will always have another besides the story in mind: whether it be ourselves, or our audience.

Gracy Olmstead, "Why I'm Leaving Goodreads"