On Monday October 4, 2021, Facebook, Instagram, What’s App, and any other social media app that is owned by Facebook went down for about six to eight hours. Twitter survived, and some of the Tweeters acted as if every word they write is perfect, true, and kind, and trust me, Twitter should have gone down too, as it is one of the meanest social media sites that we have. The question is, since social media was down, what did we do? What can we learn from this?
Many people jumped over to Twitter and claimed how evil the other social media sites were while they continued to be cruel with their words on Twitter. That is a condition that we see in other social circles, including and especially in the church. Christians are great at pointing out the flaws in other people, other Christians, and “those” churches, while at the same time they continue in their own sins. We must focus on our own flaws and sins, and guess what? The evil that we see in society will be less by one person. We can start doing this with social media.
Some people found that they could be more productive without checking social media throughout the day. They were able to work without the stress if anyone liked or did not like their post, or if enough people were on their platform for whatever product that they serve for others. It became a day of not worrying what other people were thinking about us. Maybe we need to begin to take more time to worry less about what other people think about us and take the time to serve those who no one even thinks about in life.
Some people struggled as they work a business from social media. They had to discover other ways to build their platforms or make time to work on their business. To build businesses, we rely on other people and their creations. We must find ways to work together to build rather than use these platforms to destroy. If we would build others up in life, we would be able to create more businesses and serve more people. We also may need to discover more ways in which to build our platforms outside of social media sites.
Some people were frustrated because they had no one around them to hear their point of views and how their point of view is perfect, true, and good, and if anyone disagrees with it, then they must unfollow them and never speak to them because they do not have perfect points of view like them. My entire sarcastic rant hopefully reveals my complete frustration with these types of posts. These people stand on the right and the left. If we struggle to connect and accept someone else’s point of view whom we cannot see, how do we treat people that we can see? We must do better. We can speak the truth, but if we do not speak the truth in love, we are just spewing our points of view recklessly, and it is why people do not listen to us nor take us seriously. If we are Christians, speaking the truth in love is a sign of maturity according to Ephesians 4:15.
We must begin to understand that not everyone will agree with our point of view. Some people have experiences that we know nothing about, and their point of view is based on their experiences of which we have no knowledge. What we see on social media is only a small portion of who someone is. Sometimes, we do not even see the truth of who someone is. We must remember that how we treat people on social media must parallel with how we treat people in real life, or everything we proclaim is a lie.
Many people realized that social media wants to control our thoughts and words. We should control our thoughts and words. We can speak the truth, but if Christians quote that part of the verse one more time without the ending to speak the truth in love, then their first phrase is useless. Social media may want to control our thoughts and words, but we are the ones who are typing the words on our pages. We are the ones sharing information that a human may or may not have created. We are the ones who choose to reply or scroll forward to something better. We must take control of what we say and do. If we are censored for saying something kind and loving and truthful, then we have a different conversation.
So, what did we learn? We learned that we are not so good without our social media platforms. We realized that social media could control what we see and think. We must learn that we must control our thoughts and words because if we don’t, someone else will come along and tell us what to think and speak. It’s been like this for centuries. It’s just easier to identify with social media. It is time we use social media as a tool, and not let that tool become our focus in life.
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