"What are you reaching for when you reach for your smartphone?" I asked via Twitter a week or two back. One friend of out of hundreds responded:
"@pauljpastor I want to see if people like me or not."
Translation: do I matter?
The New York Times published a little essay by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein last Sunday. I don't often toss around the word brilliant, but "What Would Plato Tweet" really was. Brilliant for its perspective, brilliant in its humanizing call for pursuing wisdom and justice in a world where a Klout score is a thing, and brilliant (though I'd wrestle her quick dismissal of theism's modern relevance) in its implications for pastors and all of us called to bring foretastes of Christ's renewed Kingdom into the now.
Goldstein grounds social media obsession in humanity's perennial existential crisis (summed up in under 140 characters in my friend's tweet. No offense, Tom!). In the same way that the Greeks grasped for kleos (the multiplication of voice and fame in the agora), and that the Hebrews (from Goldstein's perspective) grasped for personal significance in the covenantal story of God, the drive to multiply our presence through social media is a drive to make sure that we matter.
Goldstein says:
It's stunning that our culture has, with the dwindling of theism, returned to the answer to the problem of mattering that Socrates and Plato judged woefully inadequate. Perhaps their opposition is even more valid today. How satisfying, in the end, is a culture of social-media obsession? The multireplication so readily available is as short-lived and insubstantial as the many instances of our lives they replicate.
Well said, sister. I'm digital savvy, but I often hate the online world, with the self-defeating, technological hatred peculiar to my generation (it is, after all, part of my job to tweet, to post, to "like," and to write posts like this one). For one, I love that I hate it—my aversion easily turns to a romantic elitism. And I hate that I love it; that I look for "likes" nearly as avidly as my friends (even though I don't have a smartphone buzzing like flies in my pocket).
If I remember correctly, it was Henri Nouwen who said, in one place or another, that the pastoral vocation draws inordinate numbers of insecure people. And I know it was Nouwen, in an old interview with Leadership, who said,
It may well be that many pastors are insecure people, but that can be an asset as well as a liability … One of the most beautiful ways for spiritual formation to take place is to let your insecurity lead you closer to the Lord.
I think he's right. And if the central question of insecurity is, "Do I matter?", then Goldstein's big idea should prompt introspection for us, secure or insecure, who are asking the mattering questions from behind a pulpit … or a publication (even if that publication is only your Facebook feed), and leading from whatever answers we find for ourselves.
It is not coincidental that when that famous megachurch pastor (not to be named here) just announced he was dialing back his celebrity brand, he said he was leaving social media. Even in ministry—especially in ministry—personal media multiplication and mattering sometimes seem identical. And when media and mattering become mutually exclusive, we are forced to consider ourselves in a new light.
So I'll ask again—what are you reaching for when you reach for your smartphone?
Paul Pastor is associate editor of Leadership Journal and PARSE.
