How Binge Catharsis Is Replacing Prayer
On Thursday the news chronicled yet another heinous example of mental illness gone violent when an armed man shot into a crowded theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, then took his own life. For many this was a horrific, life -changing event that will follow them for the rest of their lives. For others, it was an opportunity to grieve and offer support to loved ones in need.
However, for most, Thursday meant nothing.
The advent of mass communication has plagued the social conscience of man, causing an unsettled need to engage with and properly react to tragic events. In the days of the pony express, atrocities would obviously frequent cities and rural towns of America but rarely would they gain national attention. The technology was just not there.
Fast forward past the Lindbergh baby, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, September 11th, and you will find yourself in front of an internet browser that pumps unmitigated emotions into your retinas at supersonic rates, anytime you please.
The Lafayette shooting is just one of thousands of stories every month that pushes to the top of the fold and weighs on us some despairing allegory.
But in an age of interactive media, being an idle observer who merely reads the news is no longer the standard for those who are active online. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook have created versatile outlets for normal citizens to express opinions just as meaningful, if not more meaningful than the journalists who report the facts.
Each person in his own way has to find a way to grapple with what is occurring and show how he is reacting to it. The pictures above are just a few examples of how folks reacted to the shooting. #PrayForChattanooga and #CharlestonStrong were fairly identical.
What bothers me about these online reactions to tragedy is the contrived nature of the message and the perpetuation of its effect. As someone who has personally created similar messages, there is no love or gratitude in the creation of the artwork, the tweet, etc. Someone despairing after a tragic event is not brought solitude by a retweet or favorite.
The aim of these posts is clear: to gain social capital and to echo a sweeping emotion of the social subconscious that arises from a lack of hope and faith.
You see, a person with great hope and faith would turn inwards and offer something in sacrifice for those lost. A person who truly cared would not seek the approval and regurgitation of others but offer mortification and intercessory prayer.
Individuals who have lost the ability to pray or simply do not believe in its value find themselves lacking any power to combat tragedy. One of the best/worst examples of this created a media uproar over the State Department’s “hashtag diplomacy.” First Lady Michelle Obama contributed graciously with a #BringBackOurGirls tweet, proving once and for all how powerless we all are to combat evil in the world.
The second effect is the perpetuation of chaos, or as I like to call it “binge catharsis.” On media where thoughts can float hundreds of thousands of miles in a second, we find ourselves easily binging on the support of others. Instead of turning to something or someone higher, we turn to distractions to release the pressures of complex situations.
In 2001 when the towers fell, I only had my schoolmates and one television showing the planes crashing to really perpetuate the cycle of fear and sadness. Try to imagine in your mind how the World Trade Center attacks would have felt with the addition of Twitter — it is just overwhelming. The pictures, the GIFs, the videos, the vines. I would probably be committed by now.
The lesson here is an ethical one.
The ability to gain information instantaneously must force us to re-evaluate how we react to things and where we devote our precious time.
A couple weeks ago I wrote about how the rise of instantaneous media has diminished the contemplative quality of silence that used to recharge and square away our busy lives. In the same vein, we must carefully select the issues that we confront and reserve time in our days for reflecting on them.
Merely clicking retweet is not a culpable moral action that yields fruit.
The fruit that we can bear, however, comes as a result of either direct communion with individuals who need our support or a strong internal prayer life that can foster even more answers than we are capable of by ourselves. Everything else is vain gossip on a different medium.
To cautiously conclude, there is nothing inherently wrong or bad about sharing news about the Charleston shooting or producing a particular #CharlestonStrong graphics of doves over a Palmetto tree (I actually loved this one).
However, these fleeting thoughts under 140 characters should come with a warning: the dynamic of the digital environment is changing rapidly and much like the progress of science, if we do not stop and ask hard ethical questions, we may find ourselves in an irrevocable place in history where we have numbed our ability to respond correctly to the truly important things in our lives.
