In the last few months lots of people have left X/Twitter. Most of this is driven by their distaste for the new American administration and Elon Musk’s role in it.
I like Twitter. I’ve made friends there. It’s one of the two primary routes that people have discovered my writing, which I’m thankful for. It’s not what it once was, but that’s been true for a lot longer than three months. In my opinion it’s probably better than it was about a year ago, but other people have different experiences. The more people that I enjoyed following leave, the less good it is and the less interested I am in engaging. These effects multiply themselves.
People migrate to new platforms, sure, but not in a way that drives the critical mass required to create interesting communities. Bluesky is OK and I was briefly excited by it for a few days, but I haven’t found the community of interesting people to follow so I don’t look at it much. Threads was never really that interesting.
Of course there are other, much larger platforms, but Facebook isn’t really where people go to find interesting things to read or talk about ideas. Personally, I’ve found its algorithms counter-productive to that end. Instagram is explicitly designed for different ends. TikTok is even worse.
It feels like an inflection point for the Twitter-style service. They will continue but will be more diffuse, with smaller communities and louder less-interesting conversations. That’s fine, it’s an observable effect of this kind of media. It’s happened before and probably will again. I’m quite late to commenting on this; Twitter’s heyday was a long time ago now.
It affects me because I get less hits on my blog from Twitter than I used to. I’m sure I could do something to increase that, but I don’t really want to. It is what it is. It drove home to me the importance of email lists, as Ian Harber has persuasively argued. If you generally encounter my writing via a social media, I’d request that you consider joining my email list (scroll right to the bottom of this page to do so). You’ll get each post directly then.
This post isn’t just a plug for email sign-ups, I’d like to think more broadly about things I’ve written on before: our Christian intellectual ecosystems.
In other words: how will we encounter thinkers and writers without the dynamic nature of social media? More importantly, how will they encounter each other to develop the sorts of sharpening friendships that make us all better?
I don’t think social media was doing a great job of this for Christian intellectuals, but I do think it enhanced the discoverability of lots of people’s work. It made a few people well known and read, it means a few people read my stuff. I had someone approach me in real life just last week and tell me they read my blog, which is among the most surreal experiences of my life. I suspect that wouldn’t have happened without Twitter.
For me, this shines a light on an opportunity. We are more connected than we used to be. Christian thinking can be encountered without the gatekeepers, mostly publishers, deciding what we should read. That cuts both ways, for every great thing we can read or watch or listen to that we wouldn’t have been able to before the digital revolution, there’s at least 100 pieces of absolute dross that you have to wade through. I don’t know if this is a net good or not, I suspect that it isn’t, but it is where we find ourselves.
The Opportunity
How do we want our thinkers to find each other? What settings should they develop in? If we need more ‘Doctors of the Church’ and institutions as I’ve argued before, do we want having a popular Substack to be an important step in that process? How can it become financially viable for someone to do this sort of work, especially in a country like the UK? Churches need to be discussing and answering these questions, or we’ll just be left with what we get.
Because the only financially viable way for most people to do this is Substack, a lot of good stuff is hidden behind a paywall. The average person can maybe subscribe to one or two Substack newsletters at most. The days of the free blogosphere are largely past us. I can only offer my blog for free due to the generosity of others via my Patreon who fund my hosting. This adds a layer of conundrum to the whole situation.
I’m not sure what the answer is. I’d love to say Eucharisma! It would be fun if the answer was a thing I’d already started. I think Eucharisma, if successful longer term, could be a small part of the answer and could grow to do more than it does. I don’t think it’s the answer.
The answer will, inevitably, be in churches and networks of churches. We need to create ways for thinkers to meet each other, argue, and collaborate. That’s an important part of a creative process.
We then also need to find ways for the results of these collaborations to be shared publicly. The problem with the lack of gatekeeping post-digital revolution is that the weight of dross requires some sort of gatekeeping. There are wolves out there. The theology you can find in a quick google, or by asking an LLM, is all over the shop. It’s unlikely to align with your church’s careful exegetical and theological work.
I don’t have a neat solution here, just some embryonic ideas. What we need most is for churches to engage in this space and these questions. Churches and denominations should play the gatekeeping role, funnelling their people towards good resources. Many do this. They should also help their pastors hear from good thinkers and writers. This is the harder part.
I think it would also be helpful for churches, networks, and denominations to then consider how to develop—and probably fund—those thinkers and writers. If your church thinks someone has good ideas but their work is in the wrong format for it to engage with your people (e.g. it should be in audio or video, or shorter), then you may need to engage with them to help them develop what you need. You may have to partially fund that too.
In terms of writers and thinkers sharpening each other? I suspect the answer here is for us, if it isn’t presumptuous to put myself in that group, to gather in the same place at the same time. Go to the same conferences, have lunch, see what might develop. I’ll be at THINK this year, hit me up.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
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