Social Media and Sin

“The problem is not social media. The problem is sin.”

-Excerpt from The Dangers of Social Media

Williams makes some good points this his post, The Dangers of Social Media. Personally, I see social media as “training wheels” for in real life fellowship. If we cannot be gracious, patient and long-suffering in this setting (where we actually can take hours to consider what to say before responding or even just “hide” a post and not respond at all if we find ourselves unable to respond appropriately), then deep down, the truth is that we simply *aren’t* gracious, patient or long-suffering. Of course , it is easy to dismiss this idea by simply thinking about how gracious we appear in real life — “if you only get to know me, you’ll see I’m nothing like the person I am on facebook…” But most of our face to face fellowships are short-term, a couple of hours, and acting is easy when you don’t have to sustain it for long periods of time. Social media is accessed constantly. We can only fake for so long. Who we are on the internet is who we are. There is no disconnect from the words that come out of our mouths and the ones from our fingertips — or at least, there shouldn’t be — because they both come from our heart. Similarly, if we do not manage our time well on social media,  we probably have a problem with managing our time outside social media, too. If we are going to get angry about something, let’s get angry at the real problem: sin.