The internet has a strange effect on us. Many people, myself included, have the ability to gain an ‘audience’ for something creative that they do—this writing, in my case—in a way can warp your sense of yourself and what it is that you’re actually doing.
If you pull some reasonable numbers in terms of how many people read you, then that can exacerbate the effect. You can start to think that what you do is ‘important’ in some fashion.
To speak for myself, first, my blogging is important in two different ways, but it is absolutely not important in the sense of ‘lots of people read my stuff on the internet.’ Sure, they do. It means I can afford the modest hosting. That’s fun, but it’s not in and of itself important. If I start to think it is, I’ll get drunk on my own ego; that’s a path to destruction.
My blogging is important as a place to articulate my thoughts. I’m developing a particular set of thoughts that interlace together and chipping away at small aspects of that in blog posts is important in terms of developing my own thinking. Other people reading it is, in that sense, part of the discipline that keeps me going rather than just idling in a notebook.
My blogging is also important when its read by flesh and blood people that I know, people that text me about ideas or ask me about it over Christmas lunch in Wetherspoons with a few other local pastors. That’s important because these are people I know and I’m actively investing in those relationships.
I don’t mean to suggest, dear friends, that my other readers are not relevant to me, but I think if I start to write for ‘an audience’ then there’s a genuine risk that this intellectual exercise develops into the kind of moral acid that social media has a tendency to be. I think there’s also a genuine risk that I suspect that I’m someone whose opinion matters to other people who I only know through the internet. I need to instead be grounded in real, flesh and blood, networks with people who engage with my thinking but also know what’s going on in my life and my church. The alternative is the allure, and curse, of thinking you’re a celebrity.
I’ve noticed this in a few people I do know online. This is not intended to be calling them out, I’m hopefully musing instead on how to avoid the same danger myself. Let me give some examples of things I’ve seen in other people either in their blogs or on social media.
There’s the person who thinks they’re an important part of an online conversation. Let’s say you disagree with a modestly prominent figure in a particular online Christian niche. Fair enough. Let’s say you write about it, wherever that may be. Also fair enough. Let’s say you chose in that writing to specifically call that person out: that’s not really my thing but there’s a place for that sort of polemic writing, especially if you think particular ideas are dangerous. There are some people where most of their online persona is responding to other people and saying they’re wrong. In and of itself that doesn’t have to be a problem but the fact it’s an easy way to build an audience is something that should make us cautious about the effect of that behaviour on our souls. The way that’s goes wrong along the track I’m suggesting is when someone starts to assume that because the people that they’re criticising haven’t replied to them they are somehow rudely declining conversation.
As the words stack up the writer starts to moan about how they’re ‘offered’ to dialogue but ‘no one’ has taken them up on the offer. It doesn’t seem to occur to the writer that the person they’re talking about hasn’t read their piece. Or, perhaps, that they did see it, but it wasn’t that interesting for them to engage with. Perhaps it wasn’t well written. Perhaps they don’t have time to respond to you. Perhaps they deliberately pick where they respond and why.
It starts to look sort of desperate. It can also exhibit in the person who claims of some semi-public figure that ‘they never respond to criticism!’ when what they mean is ‘I tweeted at them and they didn’t reply.’ Notwithstanding that the algorithm doesn’t show people all the replies so they may not even have seen it, there are lots of reasons people might not respond to a message that aren’t that you devasted their position. X/Twitter is a semi-reasonable format for curious exploring of ideas and sharing of links, but a terrible format for testing ideas or disagreeing about them. I see these behaviours in people who really should know better.
In all these examples, the problem is that the person thinks that they’re someone. It’s the youtubeifcation of life: everyone is a celebrity now. We all think we have something worth saying, we’re all in the conversation. This sort of democratisation can be a wonderful thing. No one would read a word I write without that, let’s be honest. However, it’s also quite the drug. We’re all at risk of turning into celebrities and thinking we’re therefore owed other people’s time and that our thoughts are particularly interesting. This is true to a lesser extent even for those who just consume rather than create media, as we’re exposed to others acting in these ways we have to actively fight to not construe ourselves in the same way. The kids call it main character syndrome; the adults call it pride.
I notice it in myself when I check to see if anyone has interacted with what I wrote, which doesn’t happen that often. There’s a mixed motivation caught between the perfectly sensible desire to poke around a few interesting ideas and the perfectly deadly desire to be noticed and thought of well by ‘important’ people. If I’m honest my motivations can swing between those poles.
Pride is not a new problem. It’s as old as sin. What we need to do is notice the ways that these (relatively) new media present new opportunities for the oldest of foibles and snares. Watch yourself, few others will.
Photo by Orkun Azap on Unsplash
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