How is Media Affecting Us? (Final Media Monday)

Today the 8 week series titled Media Mondays comes to an end. The question I sought to answer in this series was:

How is social media and this digital world of ipads, iphones and ipods affecting our relationship with God, our marriages, our parenting, our homemaking, our friendships and our health?

8 weeks ago – we started here with these thoughts:

 Tim Challies, the author of The Next Story: Life and Faith After the Digital Explosion, writes:

“Our lives have become saturated with sounds and images flashing in front of our eyes, blaring into our ears…At work we spend forty hours staring at computer screens. at home we watch television or visit our favorite websites. Between work and home we check our route on the GPS and dash off a few text messages. Even at church we watch our pastors on screens before returning home to watch sermons on the Internet. Life is mediated by the screen.” p.89

Here are the links to the week by week posts if you missed one:

Media and Our Walk with God

Media and Our Marriages

Media and Our Parenting – Part 1

Media and Our Parenting – Part 2

Media and Our Homemaking

Media and Our Friendships

 Media and Our Health

The reality is times have changed. Jesus lived in a different context than we do. Never before have women carried access to all the world’s knowledge on a tiny device in our purse! Screens are everywhere – at church, work, gyms, in my homeschool room, on airplanes, in the car, and in our pockets. Twitter, Facebook, Blogging and Youtube have become the new front porch affecting all of our friendships. In 60 years, we’ve gone from zero screen time to an omnipresent screen – they are everywhere and we don’t even notice them! There has been a massive pace change in the last 100 years.  It is affecting us! 

There are a few areas I never addressed in this series, that are affecting us:

1. Privacy – The use of social media has affected everyone’s privacy.  I’ve even seen private emails (of a well-known pastor I adore) leak into the hands of the wrong people and posted publically on-line to be used to harm him.  It made me realize that every email I send must be filtered through God’s word…and be potentially ready to be made public. 

2.  Photos – I have a cabinet full of photos that I’ve slipped into albums and into scrapbooks 5 years ago…but my photos from the last three years have remained jpegs.  Our digital cameras are able to take so many shots that it’s hard to keep up with the plethora of photos we are taking.  But the quality of our photos and the way we can tweak them with photoshop and other applications is truly amazing!  Never before have images been so rich for the eyes and again so public!

3. Creativity is at an all time high.  All you have to do is spend 10 minutes on youtube and you’ll see exactly what I mean!   I know that I may have never taken up writing if blogging did not make it so easy for me to get my thoughts out.  I’ve journaled since I was 15 years old and I have a feeling I’d still be journaling all my thoughts, for no one to see, if it weren’t for social media.

Media is amoral – it is neither good nor bad – rather it is the use of it that determines its morality.   We must filter it through God’s word and come to our keyboards ready to glorify God with every word we read or write.  We must remember – no matter what era we live in or how our culture changes:

 “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” Hebrews 13:8

 

 So let’s get our final discussion of Media started.

What are your final thoughts or conclusions on this series and what can you add to the list – how else is social media affecting us?

1. If you are a blogger and you have decided to join this series by blogging each week, please place the Media Mondays button somewhere on your blog so your readers can find us here and then link-up below (right click – “save as” the button).

2. If you are not a blogger but are on Facebook or Twitter, I want to encourage you to copy and paste this link from the browser above on your status update and ask your friends for their thoughts.

 

3. If you have thoughts or questions you want me to address in this series, please leave a comment above. I will try to answer as many as I can either during the series or in the comment section.

Walk with the King!

13 Comments

  1. I have loved your thoughts in this series, Courtney. Thanks for taking the time to address this topic in a friendly, Biblical and informative way.

  2. I just have to tell you, I’ve been starting these posts in advance each of the last few weeks but I just read your entire post and saw ‘filter’ at the end…that was exactly my thought and theme! Blessings to you and thank you for inspiring me to write more.

  3. I heard from a cousin that this will be the “lost generation” because photos are not tangible as jpegs, and soon the devices used to view them will be replaced by ‘newer and better’ so eventually no one will ever see them. Sad right? Doesn’t it make you want to go out and print all those photos now!?!

    Thanks for your challenging posts about Media and our lives. I’m a new reader on your blog and have enjoyed it a lot.

  4. I just signed up to receive WLW via email. I missed this whole series link-up! I’m disappointed because my blog is quite focused on Pop-Culture and Media. I’m a Media Educator, so, I’ve got lots to say… great job exposing the truth, there aren’t many people really taking a critical look at how these mediums are affecting our lives. 🙂
    Cassandra @ Unplug Your Family

  5. Thanks so much for sharing your insight and wisdom with us through this great series, Courtney. I love how you’ve pointed out that, “Media is amoral – it is neither good nor bad – rather it is the use of it that determines its morality. We must filter it through God’s word and come to our keyboards ready to glorify God with every word we read or write.” That is so true and such a great reminder!

    Re: photos: I don’t print out as many pictures as I used to, but I’m determined to preserve them in photo books (I make mine at Shutterfly.com). I’m doing pretty well at keeping up, though I must admit that I’m a little behind. Hope to be caught up soon. Thankfully, it won’t take me as long as paper scrapping used to take. 😉

    Thank you again, Courtney! I’m so glad I found your website. : )

    1. Good for you for printing your photo books! I’m doing the same – no need to get behind scrapbooking, just printing them out all ready completed! 🙂

  6. Thanks Courtney for such great insights. This has been my first blog linkup and I chose your website because I can so clearly see that your heart longs to be a servant of God in all that you do…enjoyed learning from you and all the other bloggers.

  7. We decided not to have cable anymore many years ago because we noticed it was just too much of a time waster. We only have just recently gotten internet because we started homeschooling our children. We choose not to have anything else other than internet.
    I definately think the more simple you keep your life, the better. Kids are overstimulated with the computers, tv’s, outside activities, etc,etc.
    I do believe modern technology harms families and that is why we made the choice a long time ago not to have it in our home. We need to get back to the basics! and teach our daughters how to cook, or just have conversations with our kids once in a while!

  8. Hey there, I just wanted to say thank you for writing about these chapters, I just ordered your book, a bit late yes, but I see the content of the forum and everything is still there! 🙂 I hope it gets here soon it has great reviews on amazon by the way !

  9. HI there.. Me too!
    I Boght the book and will prbably doing the study together with Tara who posted above and who is areally good friend I met- through social Media-

    Thank you fro a very inspiring blog! all the way to Germany!

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