social media

5 Things I Learned from My Six-Week Social Media Fast

May 3, 2017 By Michelle 11 Comments

I hadn’t “given up” anything for Lent in years, but when my pastor asked on Ash Wednesday, “What’s keeping you from growing in your relationship with God?” I knew social media was my answer.

Now that Lent is over and Easter has come and gone, I’m back on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, this time, I hope, a wiser, more discerning user. I can tell you straight up: the fast made a difference. I spend a lot less time on social media than I used to, and I’m much less inclined to pick up my phone when I have a few minutes of downtime.

Here are five things I learned from my fast.

Social media can be addicting.
I’d read the scientific research about the connection between social media and the release of the feel-good brain chemical dopamine, but I’d always assumed I was somehow immune…until, that is, I gave up social media and found myself picking up my phone two dozen times a day. It was almost like I’d trained my brain and my body to need to have my phone in my hand.

I was surprised by how long it took to break the addiction; more than two weeks passed before the urge to reach for my phone finally began to diminish.

Social media is distracting.
Turns out, there was a pattern to my social media habits. I typically scrolled Facebook or Twitter and then, when I glimpsed a headline that piqued my interest, I clicked over to the site. I rarely read an article from start to finish, but instead quickly skimmed the content before clicking over to something else, repeating this process a half-dozen times before finally clicking off the Internet altogether.

The cycle left me feeling fragmented, rushed, distracted, and vaguely anxious. Stepping away from social media allowed me to identify this pattern and see the harm it was causing my mental and spiritual well-being.

Social media impacts our ability to think critically.
My social media fast helped me see that my critical thinking skills had grown rusty. Instead of forming an educated opinion of my own, more often I simply regurgitated the opinions and arguments of others. Away from Facebook and Twitter, I was better able to ask myself, “What do YOU think about that?” and figure out my own answer.

Social media blunts our sensory perception.
Two days after Ash Wednesday I sat in my front yard, eyes closed, faced tipped toward the early spring sun, and listened to the birds. The longer I listened, the better I was able to identify distinct calls from the cacophony of chirps and cackles. I realized then that it had been a long time since I’d heard the birds. Without my nose in an app, I was more present to the nuanced beauty of God’s creation.

Social media is not the spawn of Satan.
I missed my long-distance friends during my six-week fast, the people with whom I’ve formed real relationships across the cyber waves. I missed the random pictures of sunsets and beach vacations and birthday celebrations. I missed the conversations, the curious musings, the bits of goodness scattered here and there.

My fast helped me see where my social media habits cross the line into unhealthy behavior, but it also reminded me that I needn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Although it was challenging for the first few weeks, my Lenten social media fast turned out to be an enlightening and fruitful experience. And while I’m mostly glad to be back in the world of hashtags and emoji, I have a clearer understanding of why it’s better for my spiritual and mental health if social media is enjoyed in moderation.

An edited version of this post was first published in the April 29 edition of the Lincoln Journal Star.

My Reaction to the Facebook Reactions {or…Use Your Words, People!}

February 25, 2016 By Michelle 18 Comments

So in case you missed it, yesterday Facebook exploded in celebratory glee over the introduction of its new emoticons, otherwise known as “Reactions,” according to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. No longer do we need to feel limited by the lowly “Like” button; we now have a heart Love button, a haha Laughter button, a yay Happy button {by the way, the Yay button is only available in Spain and Ireland right now…because apparently the Spanish and Irish are a lot Yayier than the rest of us}, a surprised Wow button, a frowny Sad button and a beady-eyed Angry button.

Ever the late adopter, I posted my own reaction to the Reactions on my Facebook page:

“Am I the only one who doesn’t love the new Facebook emoticons? I have 58 toothpastes to choose from, 148 kinds of deodorant, 9,000 kinds of cereal, 14,000 television stations, and now I have 6 Facebook faces, too. It’s too much! My brain is melting! Choice overload! How about we just go back to “Like” or move on? My head is going to pop off the first time someone gives me the angry face on a status update (go ahead, try it – who is going to be the first?!) ‪#‎curmudgeonly‬ (where’s the face for that, eh?)”

Plus, there’s the fact that I know myself. I already take note of the “Likes” on my posts (oh come on, get over it, you know you do, too). I can see how this is all going to go down…

“Huh. Only four Loves. Why only four Loves? Why 47 Likes but only four Loves? Why am I worthy of Like but not Love?! For the love, where is the LOVE?!”

Or… “Hey, she gave me the Angry Beady Eyes. What did I ever do to her? What did I do to deserve the Angry Beady Eyes? Yeah? Yeah? Fine. Angry Beady Eye right back at you, babe.”

I mean seriously, I’m already a navel gazer. These six new emoticons are only going to plunge me into a whole new level of navel-gazing, and it ain’t gonna be pretty.

I was mostly joking last night when I posted that status update about the new emoticons, until later, that is, when suddenly I wasn’t.

You see, I got to thinking about when I was in college. I wrote in long-hand (what, pray tell, is long hand?) to my nana and to my nana’s sister, my great aunt Mary, at least once a month – on my very own monogrammed stationery, no less. And I received letters from them in return. I still remember crouching down to open the tiny metal door of my dorm post office box and spotting the telltale dusty pink envelope, knowing my grandmother’s notepaper, with a rosebud at the top, just above the delicate script, From the Desk of Elizabeth DeRusha, was folded inside. I didn’t keep any of those letters (I got the Anti-Sentimental Gene from my dad), but I still remember how much I cherished receiving them at the time.

Now, I may sound like I am 1,009 years old for saying this, but for heaven’s sake, what have we come to with these Facebook emoticons? Your coworker posts a sentimental note on Facebook about the death of her grandfather, and you click Frowny Sad Face and move on. Your sister posts a selfie of her new haircut, you click the heart. Finito. Your BFF posts about her terrible, awful, no good, very bad day, and you click Beady Angry Eyes to signify “Grrrrr, those are the worst.” Or do you click Frowny Sad Face to demonstrate empathy? Or do you click both for good measure?

Click. Done. Scroll on. Click. Done. Scroll on.

Facebook’s new “Reactions” simply give us another excuse and another way to skate through life on vapid autopilot. They let us off the hook by allowing us to pretend we are expressing heartfelt emotion – joy, sorrow, empathy, compassion, anger– when in fact, all we’re really doing is taking the easy way out. We’re not connecting, were clicking. And clicking. And clicking. And clicking.

Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg had to say about the Reactions launch on his own Facebook timeline yesterday (by the way, did you know that Mark Zuckerberg has 52,254,708 followers? For reals. It’s practically a ticker tape!) :

“Not every moment you want to share is happy. Sometimes you want to share something sad or frustrating. Our community has been asking for a dislike button for years, but not because people want to tell friends they don’t like their posts [ahem, clearly Mark hasn’t visited the Christian Facebook community lately]. People wanted to express empathy and make it comfortable to share a wider range of emotion. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the right way to do this with our team. One of my goals was to make it as simple as pressing and holding the Like button. The result is Reactions, which allow you to express love, laughter, surprise, sadness or anger.”

I hear what you’re saying, Mark, I really do. People do want to express a broader range of emotions beyond the bland, pallid “Like.” People do want to express joy, sorrow, disappointment, empathy, compassion and anger, in real life and on Facebook. People do want to react. But there is an effective, meaningful way to do this, and it doesn’t entail simply “pressing and holding” a button.

It’s called using our words. Our powerful, eloquent, insightful, angry, sorrowful, poignant, beautiful, celebratory, life-giving words.

Words are still important, even in this Brave New World of emoticons and Reactions – especially in this Brave New World of emoticons and Reactions. In spite of what Mark Zuckerberg says about “making it comfortable” to share emotion, the truth is, sometimes emotion is uncomfortable. Grief is uncomfortable. Anger is uncomfortable. Sorrow and loneliness are uncomfortable. What we need is to learn how to sit with and in this discomfort. Words, though not always perfect, allow us to do that in a way that robotically clicking a cartoony “Reaction” never will.

Words have the power to move us to tears. Words have the power to make the hair on our arms and the back of our necks stand on end. Words have the power to make us dance, shout, curse, and cheer. Words have the power to start a movement. Words have the power to change us. Words have the power to change the world.

Words give us life and breath and love. Words are Life and Breath and Love.

God gave us words because they have the power to connect us — to help us see and hear, to know and understand one another. Words, plain and simple, are a gift.

So maybe the next time we go to click one of those emoticon faces, we can take a second to pause and remember that. Let’s remember that words are a gift we can give and receive…even on Facebook, even in this Brave New World.

{and yeah, when I post this on Facebook, you all better give me a whole lot of those hearts}

2016: A Year of Stopping

January 12, 2016 By Michelle 16 Comments

I saw the first snowflake fall a few minutes ago. Well, not the first snowflake ever, obviously. And probably not even the first snowflake to fall in my backyard today. But it was the first snowflake as far as I could see. It fell from the sky like a crumb of angel food cake. I didn’t recognize what it was at first. Only when I saw another and then another did I realize it had begun to snow, lightly, and silent like mist.

It’s rare for me to sit at my desk and gaze out the window. My “office” is in our sunroom; my desk is surrounded on three sides by floor-to-ceiling windows that open to the garden and the backyard. But I don’t spend much time actually looking. I’m too “busy” to waste that kind of time.

I typically start my work day with a quick peruse through Facebook and Twitter. I “like” a few status updates, comment here and there, click over to skim a blog post or an article, retweet a couple of things, post links to my own blog posts, if I have anything new. Once I finally get down to the business of my real work for the day, I’m usually pretty focused. Sometimes I even forget to pause for a bathroom break and find myself squirming uncomfortably in my chair.

But. When I do hit a block – grappling for the right word, frustrated with a clunky transition, unsure which direction to go or what I even want to say next – I click over to social media. I scan and scroll and click and retweet, and when I finally make it back to my own piece — the piece I’d abandoned when I hit the wall — I discover I’m just as stuck and frustrated as ever. I haven’t given my brain a chance to reset or rest or meander in a fruitful way, but instead, have filled it with noise and distraction.

One of my New Year’s resolutions this year is to make my work time more productive by pausing in a way that’s beneficial to the creative process. In other words, to “resist absentminded busyness” as Maria Popova says, paraphrasing Søren Kierkegaard. This means no quick email checks; no popping over to Facebook or Twitter; no Instagram scrolling; no blog post reading. I won’t begin my work day that way, and I won’t interrupt it that way when I get stuck. I’m sure this is not a revelation for you, but I’m finally beginning to understand that social media is detrimental to my creativity and my productivity as a writer.

Instead, I resolve to look out the window. Or use the bathroom. Or switch out a load of laundry. Or make a cup of tea. Or walk to the mailbox to slip an envelope inside and raise the flag. I resolve to do something that rests my brain so that when I return to the page (screen), my mind isn’t pinging with noise and distraction, but instead is open, quiet and refreshed.

I actually made three New Year’s resolutions this year — I love to make resolutions, you know (it’s keeping them that’s the problem…just ask me about flossing) — and each of them has something to do with stopping (I’ll talk a little more about the other two later this week and next).

On Sunday I listened to a new-to-me podcast called “This Good Word” with author Steve Wiens. The episode was entitled “Stop,” and in it, Wiens urged his listeners to “let 2016 start with stopping.”

I love that. It can be applied to so many facets of life, and in the episode, Wiens asks some great questions aimed at helping us think about how we can stop more in our daily lives. By the time I listened to “This Good Word” during my afternoon run on Sunday, I’d already made my stopping-related resolutions, but the ways Wiens talked about stopping helped to clarify what I’d been pondering since January 1.

It’s snowing harder now as I write this, thick flakes falling languidly, leisurely, straight down from the sky. They seem to be taking their time traveling from the heavens to the ground, not bent so much on arriving, but on the process of getting here instead.

I think I’ll watch them for a little while longer before moving onto my next project. It seems these snowflakes might have something important to say.

Social Media Doesn’t Define You {No Matter How Pretty the Word Pictures Are}

November 19, 2015 By Michelle 23 Comments

Yesterday I did one of those gimmicky Facebook games – I am such a sucker for gimmicky Facebook games. This one promised to create a picture comprised of the words I use most often in my Facebook posts. Cool, I thought, sign me up!

So here are my results:

I didn’t think too much of it at first. I was pleased God got in there…that seemed important for a “Christian writer.” I did, however, find it a little frightening that He was competing neck and neck with “book” and “blog.” That didn’t seem quite right.

Brad made a cameo appearance in the bottom right corner – yay, Brad! — but Luther got equal billing. Freud would have a field day with that.

Overall, it could have been worse. I was a little worried that “suckbag” or “wine” was going to end up front and center on my word picture.

I was mildly entertained by the game. Until, that is, I began to see other people’s word pictures splattered all over Facebook.

My friend Lelia’s featured the word “God” so big it looked like a billboard. I mean, GOD was practically her only word!

Another friend’s looked like she had cherry-picked All The Best Words for her picture, which was squeezed to overflowing with descriptors like “love,” “family,” “joy,” “connection,” “Jesus,” “God,” “believe” and “grateful.” Was she reading the Beatitudes every day prior to posting on Facebook?

Another friend’s was all lighthearted and fun: “birthday,” “family,” “love,” “heart,” “music,” “Christmas.” Clearly she was reading a little too much Mary Engelbriet.

I clicked back to my picture, which suddenly looked a little sparse. This was the best I could do? These were my most-used words? “Girls,” “now,” “look,” “go,” “little,” “like”…What am I, a third grader?

I looked more closely and noticed something else. My words leaned heavily toward the self-absorbed.

“I’ve”

“I’m”

“I’d”

“Need”

“Want”

Perfect.

I clicked back to my main feed and looked at some more of my friends’ and acquaintances’ word pictures:

“Love,” “people,” “good!”

“Hope,” “living,” “amazing,” “giving!”

“Happy,” “friends,” “best!”

Good grief! I have the worst words! I have the most juvenile, self-involved, self-absorbed, narcissistic words! I am a narcissist! Facebook has proved it!

There I was, my finger poised to delete my stupid Most Used Words on Facebook post from my timeline, full of shame and humiliation that my words weren’t fancy enough or Christian enough or love-thy-neighbor enough, when I stopped in my tracks.

This, my friends, is the insidious nature of social media. It fuels comparison. A click here, a click there, and before we even realize it, we’re assuming that everyone else has a prettier, more organized, more neighborly, more loving, more holy life. Social media paints a false picture of reality, and as a result, it tricks us, leaving us feeling empty, less-than and ashamed, like we don’t measure up and clearly never will.

Friends, what you post on Facebook or tweet on Twitter or pin on Pinterest or Scope on Periscope is not you. It may be a sliver of you. It may offer us a few insights into who you are and what you believe in and what you value and what you are thinking in that given moment on that given day, but it’s not a full picture of the flesh and blood unique and beautiful you that God made.

Not. Even. Close.

I almost believed it for a minute there. I almost believed that Facebook could define me based on the words I’ve used most in status updates over the past however-many-months. I almost believed that Facebook could define me period.

Luckily I remembered, at the very last second, that it’s how I live my life offline, not what I choose to post about it on social media, that defines who I am.

By the way, I tried to convince Brad to do the Most Used Words on Facebook. He refused. I think he was secretly afraid it would look like this:

Moby Dick

That Time I Dreamed about the Pope {or, How I Desire to be Known}

July 30, 2015 By Michelle 13 Comments

We’re just back from my favorite place in the world: the North Shore of Lake Superior, where we have a cabin on the edge of the lake that looks like an ocean. I’ve loved this place ever since my very first trip there with Brad more than 20 years ago.

Up on the North Shore, you can walk through a birch grove and hear nothing but the sound of the wind through the leaves, the call of a chickadee, the crunch of pebbles beneath your hiking boots.

You can underhand toss a smooth-as-butter rock into the glassy lake and watch the ripples expand further and further out until they disappear, blending into the great expanse of water that stretches as far as your eye can see.

You can leap wild and carefree with a yelp that echoes into the cavernous space, a split-second moment of blood-roiling exhilaration before the cold tomb closes over your head and you emerge sputtering and flailing.

You can sit on a boulder, your feet tucked in tight, and watch the water swirl around your fingertips as it burbles toward the thundering falls.

You can dip a paddle into strands of lakeweed wavering like snakes. You can laugh till your sides ache when your mom’s marshmallow erupts into flames and slides into the coals in one goopy glump. You can perch on the rocks and watch as day ebbs into night and the sky and the lake become one.

I love all these things about the North Shore, but on this trip, I realized there’s one thing about our cabin on the edge of Lake Superior that I love most of all:

There’s no wifi. No computer. No Dish, cable or DirectTV. On some days, depending on who knows what, there isn’t even a proper cell phone connection.

At the cabin, I am truly disconnected. For one week out of fifty-two, I let it all go – the likes and comments; the Amazon rankings; the who’s arguing about which issue and which movie star is getting divorced from whom and whose blog post went viral and whose book is coming out when and why did she get an advance copy and I didn’t and I don’t think Kate Middleton should have chosen that hat and maybe I should try to pitch the Huffington Post again and did you hear about Whitney Houston’s daughter and why did I only get 11 shares on that blog post it took me four hours to write and hey I had no idea capri pants aren’t in style anymore.

Gone. Off the radar screen entirely with nary a second thought. It all melts away, and I don’t even notice it’s gone. Until, that is, I recognize what’s slipped into its spot, what’s taken its rightful place in the forefront, in full, crystal-clear focus:

My life.

My people. My place. My real thoughts, emotions and deepest desires.

My real life.

I know, I know these things should always be first; these things should always take priority. I mean, how pathetic, right, that my online life takes precedence over my actual, real, in-the-flesh life? But that’s the honest, ugly truth. It does. Not always, not all the time, not every minute. But often enough. Too often.

“I live my life in widening rings which spread out to cover everything.”

That’s the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. I read that line in one of his poems while I was up at the cabin, and it stopped me in my tracks. Because the hard truth is, I don’t always — or even often — live my life in widening rings. When I choose social media, when I choose to let social media dictate my life rather than living and being fully present in my real, actual, in-the-flesh life, I find myself living in an increasingly smaller and smaller space. More often than not, social media and my online life press in on me from all sides and crush the very life and breath out of me.

This, friends, is a quandary. Because as much as I dislike it, as much as I find that social media zaps the life right out of me, it’s an integral part of a writer’s professional life these days. Now, I could be brave like my friend Shawn Smucker, who recently closed his Facebook and Twitter accounts entirely, but frankly, I’m chicken. My platform stinks like giant rotten tomatoes as it is; can I really afford to step off the grid?

Or, here’s another, more difficult question: am I simply offering the platform rationale as an excuse? Is the real truth that I won’t step away from social media because it feeds my need to be known?

While I was on vacation in Minnesota I had a dream that I recalled in intricate detail when I awoke. In the dream, I was in charge of a visit by the Pope (it was not Pope Francis, but Francis’s successor, apparently). When I met the Pope, I extended my hand and introduced myself, and as he shook my hand, the Pope looked at me closely, and then said, I kid you not, “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere? You look familiar…Oh! I know! I read your articles in the Journal Star!”

No lie. I dreamed that the Pope recognized me from my articles in the Lincoln Journal Star.

Once I was awake and had stopped dying of laughter, I realized the gravity of this funny-but-not-really-funny dream. It pointed in technicolor clarity to my desire to be known. Recognized. Dare I say, famous.

This, friends, is my be-all and end-all idol: I want to be known and valued.

Now here’s the point where, if I were a good Christian writer, I’d tell you that I am known – known by the One and Only One who matters. But I can’t do that, at least not honestly, because even though I believe and know it in my head, I don’t always believe and truly know it in my heart. And so to go down that road right now in this blog post, with relevant Bible verses and encouraging words, wouldn’t really be truthful or authentic.

Maybe this is where we come back to my struggles with faith. Maybe I haven’t been transformed as much as I’d like to believe. Because the truth is, if I truly believed and knew in my heart that God knows me and loves me and values me, and that’s all that really counts or matters when all is said and done, would I really continue to struggle day in and day out with this idol? Wouldn’t this problem be solved by now if I really believed I am known by God and that being known by him is the only being known that matters?

And how about this: if I don’t always truly believe and know in my heart that I am known by God and that’s all that matters, can I say I really, truly believe in God?

Oh boy. We’ve gotten ourselves down into one big ol’ rabbit hole, haven’t we? And you thought this post was going to be all Minnesota pretty pictures, didn’t you? {yeah, me too – thus the trouble with writing…sometimes it leads you where you don’t expect and where you don’t really want to go}

It seems I’ve been doing this a lot lately: leaving you with more questions than answers, more unsettled than peaceful. I’m sorry about that, I truly am. I guess though, for what it’s worth, questions and unsettledness go hand-in-hand with real life, and maybe even with real faith. At least that’s the way it seems to be for me.

For now, I’ll leave you with that Rilke quote again, because I think there’s something there that’s relevant to all the topics and questions I’ve touched on here: social media, being present, asking questions, wrestling with idolatry, living out faith. Friends, together let’s ask ourselves this; let’s sit with this question a bit today:

Are you living your life in widening rings? And if your answer is no, like it is for me, how might you begin to change that?

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