background on Social Media

An incredible amount of energy goes into curating our online personas. Kim Kardashian, the patron-saint of social media, once said she “needed” about 1,200 selfies per day in order to get the good one...

So in the last three years, in order to reorient myself and head back onto the narrow way, I’ve given up social media and/or the internet for Lent. At first it’s agonizing. I’m like a caffeine or nico...

I witnessed a ritual sacrifice in the middle of a cool, third-wave coffee shop the other day. It’s the sort of place that attracts herds of bearded hipsters and where they brew your coffee by hand, on...

We don’t necessarily need to wade through research studies or the expert opinions of psychologists to prove that devices and social media apps are designed to become invasive, habit-forming and compul...

As the speed and choices of the digital age send us hurling toward impatience and shallowness, they culminate in its most damaging consequence: isolation. Social media, in particular, lures us in unde...

Whether young or old, Americans are feeling more isolated. According to a recent study from the Pew Research Center, about half of Americans have weekly interactions with their neighbors, which means ...

Addiction isn’t just measured in time spent connected to screens but also in how it dulls our spiritual sensibilities. We use social media to blunt the edges of overwhelm, to find something to thrill ...

One of the real problems in modern life is that people who are good at being civil lack strong convictions and people who have strong convictions lack civility.

Adolescents have been offered a license to post without any accompanying ethical framework. Is it fair to blame teens for misusing tools that didn’t exist in our childhood? If I had been given a phone...

Those who insist we are even more self-centered today might point to how the titles and focus of our popular magazines have shifted, as photographer Fred Ritchin notes: “I always use a quote by Paul S...

Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addic...

Social media addiction also changes our neurochemistry: our slumped posture produces cortisol; the backlit phone and blue light can suppress melatonin (needed for sleep); and a recent study with “hard...

After surveying an incredibly diverse cross section of college students across America, Donna Freitas found “the most pressing social media issues students face: the importance of appearing happy”—and...

Pinterest images display perfectly planned and executed birthday parties, not three-year-old’s crying because their turn with the bat didn’t break the pinata. Instagram posts feature shots of happy p...

Did you see the “Smiling Selfie in Auschwitz”? An American teenager touring Auschwitz stirred up a firestorm of criticism when she posted a picture of herself smiling amid a concentration camp (and ev...

Deconstruction isn’t a  trendy  thing to do, but it is a  trend  that is happening at scale in our country and passing from person to person. Anecdotally, when I look up various hashtags on TikTok, th...

The picture shows cartoon villain Cruella de Vil, bloodshot eyes staring straight ahead, hands clutching the wheel of her infamous coupe, black-and-white hair waving wildly in the wind, oversi...

When I talk with parents of adolescents, the conversation often turns to smartphones, social media, and video games. The stories parents tell me tend to fall into a few common patterns. One is the “co...

In His book When Narcissism Comes to Church, Chuck DeGroat describes a common tool employed on social media, gaslighting: Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse that draws its name from a 1938 Bri...

I have a nagging sense that when we read the word blessed , we either feel indifferent or suspicious. Both of these responses are likely the result of the way the term is (over)used in our day-to...

A common question I’m hearing from folks these days is whether it is beneficial (or a moral imperative) to pay attention to the news. The Catholic nun and social activist Dorothy Day asked the same qu...

It turns out that the people who reported spending the most time on social media—more than two hours a day—had twice the odds of perceived social isolation than those who said they spent a half hour p...

Don’t all these little tweets, these little sips of online connection, add up to one big gulp of real conversation?

Comparison can be a bad thing, but it can also be a good thing. I’m a millennial, so I would never tell you to shut down all your socials and go back to the Dark Ages. I love that I know you had sushi...

A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act li...

Social media may appear to empower individual voices, but it’s really the crowd’s mass attention or indifference that determines which voices are seen, heard or ignored. The age of spectacles is the a...

In a television commercial for Facebook, a large, gregarious family sits down to a meal. It is a Norman Rockwell moment. In our positive associations to family dinner, myth and science come together. ...

In the short term, online communication makes us feel more in charge of our time and self-presentation. If we text rather than talk, we can have each other in amounts we can control. And texting and e...

In this excerpt from Jay Y. Kim’s book, Analog Church , the author shares about an experience at a local restaurant after being convicted of his own smartphone use at home, keeping him from being p...

In a surprisingly honest confession, the millennial writer Veronica Rae Saron shared this interesting fact in her 2016 article for Medium: Conversation after conversation, it has become more and mor...