Monday, May 20, 2019

Making media choices

This weekend I gave a really brief social media workshop in a Cambridge parish. The participants were mostly Holy Family Institute novices and their families, and a few other parishioners.  I've also been doing some moderating of our community's Facebook pages. So I've had "social" and "media" on my mind over the past few weeks.

When I first entered the Daughters of St Paul (in 1975!), I would never have thought to put the two words together: social was one thing, media another. (Even now, isn't "social media" social life for introverts?) But more than ten years before I joined the #MediaNuns, the world's bishops had been seriously thinking about media, and it was they who put "social" and "media" together. In fact, they prized the "social" dimension. What good is media, the bishops at Vatican II asked, without the people behind the technologies and messages of communications?

Now I am reflecting in a different way: social media and Theology of the Body. The teachings of Theology of the Body on what it means to be made in the image of the Trinitarian God perfectly align with the Church's 1971 definition of communications: "the giving of self in love."

Maybe “self-giving” isn’t the first thing you think of in terms of communication.  But ultimately, all worthwhile communication points in this direction. This is the best we can offer, right? It means we’re holding nothing back, communicating everything: and the giving of self in love is perfect communication when it is mutual, as in the Divine Trinity.

When God wants to communicate his love to the world, he comes in person, in a human body: Jesus! When he wants his Gospel to go to the ends of the earth until the end of time, he wants it to be visible in US. For we who are the created images of the Trinity, the basic “media” is the human body itself. (Come to think about it, even our media technology depends completely on our bodies.) WE are the media! Our words are very important, but our lives are the real communication. We are second only to the Eucharist in being the Real Presence of Jesus on earth: body, blood, soul, and—yes, that share in the divine nature that makes us a communication of God. We are the greatest media of communication on earth.

And this filters all the way down to our everyday choices, including the choices we make about how we use media technology: picking up our cell phone while at the wheel; scrolling through messages during a boring meeting; checking "that" website ("just this once"); indulging in a questionable TV show...

The definition of communications can be a good basis for an examen on our way of using Instagram or Facebook, or whatever our favorite social media or TV show or gaming device is.
  • How is this app/show/game/device helping me be more present…for the gift of self that the people I am with need or have a right to?
  • How is this app/show/game/device pulling me away from the people who have a right to my attention or service (and this means at work, too)?
  • What strategies do you want to put in place to safeguard the values of family, privacy, community, balance? 
More about this tomorrow!


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