Is Social Media Anti-Social?

Copyright 2017, 2023 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

An old pastor of mine once referred to social media as “anti-social media.” At the time I found myself having a mixed reaction to his words. On one hand I understood his point-which was that online venues are poor substitutes for physically-proximate interaction with our fellow human beings. I have written in other places about my own concern that truly biblical community in the Church is being damaged by our national obsession with “virtual relationships.” On the other hand I could not help thinking about how much I have enjoyed meeting new people (my wife among them) over the past 15 years on my “platform” of choice, Facebook. This site has enabled me to share much of myself, including many of these Christian mediations, with hundreds of “friends.”

What social media has not given me, with the obvious major exception of meeting my wife, is the opportunity to develop deep friendships with people who live nearby. The comparatively few friends I have in cyberspace who also live close to me are almost entirely those whom I met in person long before I ever registered a username and password.

As for the 1300 or so people I’ve become connected with on Facebook, I “talk to” only about 3-5% of them regularly, or even semi-regularly. While it is exciting to know that some of these 10 to 15 individuals hail from as far away as Australia, I cannot claim to feel like I am close friends with them in the same sense as those who are physically a part of my life.

Meanwhile I’ve noticed that time which could be spent visiting or even just phoning nearby friends is often completely sucked-up by my weekly online hours. Admittedly not all that time is spent on social media sites, but a great deal of it is and I would estimate that my total time spent in front of a screen for non-work related purposes is close to 15 hours. I can imagine that for many people (especially those who, unlike me, own a “smart phone”) this may not seem to amount to a lot. However, much of that is time is what I used to spend with my best friends.

Why did this happen to me in recent years? Two immediate answers come to mind.

1. It seems easier to interact socially online than it does to actually get up and physically travel somewhere to visit with someone.
2. On Facebook I can post all the things I want to share with all my friends at the click of a key. I can express myself to hundreds of people without even getting out of bed (except of course to plug in my laptop!)

Both of these reasons for my own addiction to social media stem from something that is specifically warned against in Scripture, “Sloth”, or as we would call it today, laziness. I would add another character flaw to the list too: “Vanity”, which manifests itself in my deep desire to post things that matter to me and prompt people to click the “like” tab. In a way I am almost like a spoiled child wanting the attention of everybody at once, wanting them all to say, in effect, “good boy!”

Another word for Vanity, by the way, is Pride.

I do want to balance the above with the fact that I believe God has used my presence on social media to help me be a witness for Him to a potentially large number of people through my posts (this one included.) I also would be disingenuous if I did not say that I still greatly enjoy sites like Facebook and have no intention of leaving them in some Luddite attempt to turn back the clock by 25 years. This form of communication is here to stay, and so will I.

I have tried to designate a couple of days a week as Internet-free, or virtually Internet-free days. These “offline” periods, among other things, have allowed me to call and sometimes visit my physically-proximate friends and family members (though this has been made more challenging by a recent move to another part of my state.) Had I not enforced this self-discipline, I suspect my weekly time on line would be closer to 25 hours, and the remaining time to actually see people would shrink even further.

So to get back to the original implied proposition of this article, is social media actually anti-social? I suppose I would answer that is perhaps not so much anti-social in an all-encompassing sense as anti-social in a single very important one: no online relationship can truly replace two people actually getting together somewhere face to face and having a heartfelt talk. To the degree that our time spent on social media takes away from our time physically spent in each other’s company I do think it can be anti-social. I also think that the God who once looked at Adam by himself in the Garden and said “It is not good for the man to be alone” would agree. It is safe to say that He never meant for all the relationships with which we assuage our loneliness to be “virtual” ones.