Consuming Media - Habits

I have had this goal for a while, that everything I do might be for the glory of God and for the growing of faith (mine or others). I truly believe that everything has God interlayered throughout it, sometimes an act or a story is an outright rejection of God and His hope, but even that is telling God’s story in strange and powerful ways, if we only look. That is one of the reasons I wanted to start writing Christian reviews. Our ability to see God in everything needs to keep growing. Yet the thing I have come to realize is that I consume far too much media to even think about, let alone write about everything; I imagine that I am not alone in this.

This is an important realization because very few of us really think about everything that the media is doing and especially what it is doing to us. Everything we watch, listen to, read or do, is teaching us, habitualizing something, or changing our outlook whether we realize it or not. I have often thought as I finish work, I just want something mindless, but the truth about that is that something is mindless because it is thinking for you. It is deciding what the world looks like and what you should think, even if your feelings reject what is within. 

Lets take an example, if we watch reality T.V. like Jersey Shore, or Big Brother, or Selling Sunset, we are reinforcing those kind of relationships and outlooks in our minds even if we don’t relate. If we reject them while we watch them, then we are reinforcing a rejection of those who need help, which is possibly worse. This so called “reality” has a way of presenting reality that is shaping us simply by our watching. 

We could go through practically any kind of media and see the same thing, whether it is news, fiction, books, podcasts, social media or anything else. They each have a subliminal way of shaping us. 

Why am I writing this? Well, first it is to simply point it out, so that you know and are thinking about it. Second, I think we all should be mindful of what we watch and what it is saying to us. Media might be one of the most common vices and it actually hurts us. I cannot go into all the ways it does this. To be clear media is not bad, like all other vices we just don’t use media to it to its best. 

Now would I say from this that we should stop watching/consuming so much? Maybe. I have started to try to take a kind of Sabbath from technology in periodic evenings after work. I have found this strangely challenging and fruitful. I don’t know what God is calling you too, maybe it is to create conversations around what you watch, or to limit villance, or to promote time limits or to consume different varieties of media, or maybe it is to focus more on relationships. All of these, I believe, would be helpful, but I do think it is important that we switch from mere consumers, to some kind of participant.