Humans are meaning making creatures, and without meaning we don’t do too well. Our main tool in making meaning is ‘the story’ which is a problem because nearly all of our content now is delivered to us not in the form of a story but in the medium of a database. Think about it when you strip away the fancy format Twitter, and Instagram are just a single column table that presents you with mostly unrelated items one after the other, after the other. Look let me open Twitter now….

First tweet: an actress talking about the shut down of the West End, then: an advert for HSBC, a theologian speaking into #BlackLivesMatters, someone standing up for JK Rowling , a friend remembering her ordination, a quote from C.S. Lewis, a joke from a bot, an article criticising the CofE, someone discussion the translation of ‘maranatha’, a left wing comedian promoting his new show….

(It’s 15 minutes later… I got lost on a rabbit warren trail of interlinking articles…)

None of those Tweets are related to each other - and that’s the algorithmic view! not the plain ‘as they come’ timeline view. Every message is just one among a random collection, meaning that meaning is made mostly in volume of repeated messages, or just by you and what you choose to go with.

The effect is overwhelming, after just a short session on social media there is very little you can actually remember, and a type of exhaustion creeps at the edge your head because there is no narrative apart from that which you make up, or is thrust on you when everyone briefly jumps on a trending hashtag. Even worse the medium of delivery means that even the most crafted story looses its power as it is cast out into the void and is of equal value to every other message/tweet/image that goes out at that moment. The medium is the message, or in this case the medium mangles the message out into one grey meaningless blurgh….

Unsurprisingly This doesn’t help us to think well, and it means that unless we are saturated in a grand, rich, compelling, true, and good narrative then even the most insightful sermons/articles/thoughts will be deadened in their impact.

It’s not enough to just say that something is wrong or right, we need to create a world big enough that you can loose yourself in, or to put it more accurately: ‘find yourself in’, or maybe even more accurately ‘be found in’. A world bigger than the medium so we can see what it does and perhaps get a better idea of how to think and communicate with each other.