It Starts With Attraction
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It Starts With Attraction
Unpacking the Real Costs of Social Media with Chris Martin
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What if the digital world was costing us more than we realized? In this episode, we sit down with Chris Martin, an insightful author who has navigated the depths of social media’s real costs. Chris shares his journey of writing a thought-provoking book during the pandemic, drawing from his rich experiences in social media roles at Lifeway and Moody Publishers. Together, we explore how his upbringing in a tech-savvy household shaped his perspectives, and what compelled him to question the societal impact of social media so deeply.
Our conversation takes a fascinating turn as we ponder how media critic Neil Postman might critique today's digital landscape, especially from a Christian viewpoint. We chart the evolution of the social internet, reminiscing about AOL trial disks and MySpace days, while unpacking how modern platforms have shifted societal norms toward valuing affirmation over truth. The discussion extends to the ethical implications of social media's addictive designs and their effects on mental health, illustrating a nuanced portrayal of our digital lives.
As we peer into the future, the concept of the metaverse emerges, raising questions about the balance between virtual and authentic human connections. Chris and I discuss the potential for technology to both enhance and hinder intimacy, while considering society's possible rejection of tools that fail to deliver on meaningful interactions. Through reflections on Bo Burnham's creative critiques and personal anecdotes, we encourage listeners to prioritize offline experiences and nurture real-life relationships. Join us on Twitter as we continue this important dialogue and explore the themes of Chris Martin's book, "Terms of Service: The Real Cost of Social Media."
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Kimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 500,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.
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Chris, I am very excited to talk to you today about your new book that you have, but also about the experience that you've had. We were chatting just before this, so our listeners know you've had quite an experience with social media, just professionally, and had a lot of interaction with the craziness of service, and so we're going to be talking about it today and I love the tagline the real cost of social media. This is a topic I have a lot of feels about.
Speaker 2:Good, good, I do too believe it, or not? So many that I wrote a 224-page book about it.
Speaker 1:How long did it take you?
Speaker 2:So let's see, I started writing it in June of 20. And we had a newborn at the time. But it was also the pandemic, which is kind of a blessing, because we had no social obligations and newborns are much easier than toddlers in a lot of when it comes to writing books, because newborns kind of chill and toddlers are everywhere. So I just finished the draft, the first draft of a next book. That one was a little bit harder because there's a lot more going on these days. Um, but this one took from like june of 20 and I didn't turn it in until the due date of november 1st of 20. But I was done with writing by like august and just like passed it. Yeah, I, I gotta work fast. Uh, because if if I let it go, I let it, I'm gonna let something like that go and not really get back to it. So I took like two or three months to write it and then um passed it around to a bunch of folks to get their input and then made some substantive edits before I turned it in. So that was about the same with this one.
Speaker 2:I got this next one, which I know we're not talking about, but I started in August and finished. I just finished last week, so, and then I'm going to pass it around to get some feedback before I turn it in. So yeah it's, I've learned. I've learned that it's best if anyone who likes to ride or whatever out there I've learned for me and everybody's different it's best to just like crank it out and not edit yourself, not worry about that, and then just come back later and fix it all up and be like what was I thinking? That sounds really silly, or whatever, rather than try to make it perfect on the first pass, because you'll never finish if you try to do that.
Speaker 1:No, yeah, I would be. I would totally be that way. Okay, so your terms of service book. What led you to want to even write a book about social media?
Speaker 2:So I have worked in social media my whole career. I'm just 31. So I only started working in the real world in 2013. But I grew up in a home that was kind of inundated with technology. So my dad worked for IBM virtually my whole young life. He started in 1982 or so and worked there until I was a senior in high school, and what's funny is he was working from home a good bit of that time. So I experienced my dad working from home long before it was cool. My dad working from home long before it was cool, uh and uh.
Speaker 2:The, a local newspaper in 1993, did a story. Like joe martin works from home, he's one of a million americans who have a second phone line in their house. His son, christopher, can sit on his lap while he takes phone calls, um and uh. So yeah, it was really funny. But so like, so we had, uh, we had a windows 95 machine in 1995. And I was hanging out on the internet before most of my friends at school in first grade had the internet and so, yeah, so I've always been just interested in this stuff and never super tech.
Speaker 2:I was never taking computers apart and putting them back together or anything like that, but I was always very interested in the social part of the internet, which that's really what makes it kind of magical and terrible in some ways, and so I've always loved it. I wrote a blog when I was in high school and was super active on MySpace and then Facebook when it came to high school and then in college I started working for a marketing company, even though I was getting a degree in Bible, but I had a lot of experience running social media and writing on the internet. So I started working for a marketing company while I was a college student, running some social media accounts for some obscure companies, and then started at Lifeway right out of college and basically for seven years while I was there worked in a variety of social media related roles, with my final one before I left, being kind of head of social at Lifeway, and so that was a lot of work at a very tumultuous time both in the life of the organization and in the world. So I was like you know well, it was around that time I decided I want to do something not so social media related, which is why I'm at Moody Publishers now doing a little bit more offline work, I suppose you could say. But it was around 2017, 2018, toward the end of my time at Lifeway when I first started to ask questions like man, what is social media doing to us?
Speaker 2:I was spending my days 40 hours, 50 hours a week trying to figure out how to best Doing content strategy that's the best way to describe it Figuring out how do we use social media to serve people with the good news and with helpful Christian resources I work for the largest Christian resource company in the world, arguably and it was kind of like how do we People buy our print stuff all the time? How can we use the internet best to serve people online? And that's what my days revolved around, which was super fun, and I still get to do a little bit of that even today. But while I was doing all that strategy talk, I also started asking is this all good? Where is this? Is it even neutral? How is this affecting us and how is this changing more than even just the media that lives on these platforms? I started asking what's the technology that lives under the media, the algorithms, and like what are these things? How are they reshaping how we think? How are they reshaping how we view the world?
Speaker 2:And so it was around that time a friend recommended to me amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman, which is a book that was written in 1985 by Neil Postman, who's a professor of media ecology, which is just a fascinating discipline at NYU, and it's his most famous book. He's written a handful of books but it really focuses on the revolution of the television and how the television was changing entertainment habits. And really the title of the book is apt how he talked about how we were amusing ourselves to death back in the 1980s. He talks a lot about how everybody was afraid of George Orwell's 1984 big brother. The government's going to come into your house and put cameras in your house and make you watch TV and you're going to be forced into this sort of surveillance state. And he said, frankly, I think Aldous Huxley's vision of the future in Brave New World, which is another dystopian novel released around the same time as 1984. He said I think Huxley's novel is more apt, that in Brave New World what people loved, what people consumed and what they embraced is what was ultimately their demise, whereas in 1984, it was like this outside force impinging upon you and and like restricting your freedom. And he was like, honestly, I think our, our willing embrace of new technology is actually going to undermine us more than this sort of um you know, malicious force coming in from the outside.
Speaker 2:And man, when I was reading amusing, I was like this book was written in 1985 and it could not be more relevant for 2017, back when I was first reading it. And so I started thinking, like what? Neil Postman is not around today. He died in the early 2000s and he wasn't a Christian, but he was sympathetic toward Christian ideas and spoke to Christian groups and really faith groups pretty regularly, despite kind of being a secular Jewish man himself. And so I was like what, if? Like what would happen? What would it be like if Neil Postman were around today?
Speaker 2:And he was addressing social media and he was doing so from a Christian perspective? I was like I'd really love to read somebody who was doing that kind of thing, and I was frankly having a hard time finding anybody doing. I've since learned of a handful of people who are doing that sort of thing and I was frankly having a hard time finding anybody doing that. I've since learned of a handful of people who are doing that sort of thing, but back in 2017, 2018, I didn't know anyone writing about internet culture from a Christian perspective, and so I was like, well, I'll do it because it's super interesting to me and I've really bathed in this space. And so I started writing at a few different outlets about kind of internet culture and the social internet, social media, from a Christian perspective, and then launched my own newsletter around the end of 2019, beginning of 2020 in that vein and out of that, decided to pursue a book project on it, and that's kind of the roundabout way of how this came to be the long story, I suppose.
Speaker 1:Fascinating, so fascinating. So I'm looking at the table of contents in your book and I just love how it's laid out. So there's three parts how we got here, the five ways the social internet shapes us and where do we go from here. So how did the social internet evolve and how do you think it affects our lives?
Speaker 2:Oh man Um read the book.
Speaker 2:Uh, yeah, uh, this is a podcast series, right, we're here for about three hours. Um, so, uh, how did the social internet evolve with that? That's the first chapter of the book, and it's funny because it was the hardest chapter to write, because it required a lot of research. So I thought, you know, I was like, if I'm writing a book about social media, the social Internet and, if you want, I use those terms sort of interchangeably, but they're different and we can talk about that if you want. But how did the social Internet evolve is an important question, because I don't want to assume that all of us know how we got here, right? Because anyone picking up this book or even listening to this podcast, maybe 20 or 35 or 55 or 65. And for some of us the internet didn't really come around until we were adults and had children. But for some of us, like me, I was logging on to Nickelodeoncom when I was in first grade to see what the website of my favorite TV channel looked like, like, wow, nickelodeon has a website, what must that be like? And so I was doing that when I was in first grade, and so everybody has a different experience. So I was like man, if I'm going to write a book about how all this stuff is shaping us. I feel like I should get us on some shared ground of understanding the history of how we got here, and so the first chapter required a lot of research because I experienced it. I was a kid in the 90s and I remember getting 15 AOL trial disks to my house that we never were allowed to use because IBM had their own internet service and my dad was like we get that for free, I'm not paying $30 a month for AOL or whatever it costs. So I never got to have AOL myself. But I always remember getting those trial disks and I remember logging on to MySpace for the first time and what that experience was like. I remember what it was like to have MySpace as a middle schooler, which was precarious, but also like a lifeline to friends at the same time, like after school. So anyway, the first school, and so anyway I, the first chapter is really yeah, how did the social internet evolve? How did we get here? And and I've been told it's funny, I I've gotten more good feedback about that chapter than any other chat. I was like is anybody going to think this is interesting? Like it's really interesting to me to think about and and read about how MySpace tried to buy Facebook for billions of dollars or millions of dollars, and then Facebook said no, sorry, we're not going to do that and in fact we're going to 10x the price for you to buy us. It's interesting to read up and think about that kind of stuff, but I don't know if anybody else would like it. So a lot of people seem to like reading history of the internet, and that's what that's all about.
Speaker 2:But how does it affect us? Man? Much attention we get, I think it changes us. It makes us willing to give up really, really intimate details about ourselves that we would. If you told parents 15 years ago that it would be totally normal to post pictures of your children on the internet, they would have told you you were crazy. But today my wife and I have decided we're not posting pictures of our daughter on the Internet for a while until she's older. And people have kind of felt like that we're weird for doing that and it's like man, it really hasn't been that long that that swung from. You're weird if you do this to, you're weird if you don't do this, and so that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:I think it makes us want to pursue affirmation instead of truth, like we want to have our backs scratched more than we want to be told what the truth is, and I think that can be a problem. I think we've seen that a lot in sort of misinformation and how we're so easily led astray by things that we agree with but may not be true, and I think it leaves us to try to destroy people we don't like. Like people who just act objectionably, like people who say things that we think are mean or even inappropriate and they may be mean and inappropriate I'm not saying that they're not but I do think that we've kind of taken this call it cancel culture or whatever you want People have different names for it taken this mantle upon ourselves to police the conduct of other people, and and that I am very concerned about how mob mentalities are so prevalent on the internet and I and I think it's such an interesting phenomenon and, frankly, a scary one, and I think we just need to maybe a bit more gracious with people. But those are, those are a few ways I think it. It shapes us and and I get into a lot of that in the in the book, but really the thrust of the book is some folks, when I have conversations like this, it's like well, so you hate social media? You just think it's all bad. No, no, no, no, no. I work in social media. I have my entire career and it's burned me pretty bad personally and professionally. It's really been a source of stress in my life. However, I don't think it's all bad and I don't think you fix the problems of the social internet by just logging off or deleting your accounts. Now, I do think that can be a helpful step for folks to take if they're recognizing really having an unhealthy relationship with these platforms. But I think if we have this idea that, oh, if we just boycott Facebook or delete our accounts, that it'll all just go away, I just think that's foolish and I think there's good on there. I just Kind of the main point of the book and all of my writing, whether in the book or newsletter or otherwise, is not stop using this stuff.
Speaker 2:It's bad so much as hey. Let's use this stuff more critically. Let's use this stuff with our critical thinking hats on, not just passively. In every free five minutes we have in our day, we should be asking a question like what problem does Instagram solve in my life? What is Facebook doing for me more than what am I doing for Facebook? Because I think one of the biggest problems is these platforms were ostensibly pitched to us as tools to help our lives be better, and I really think we've come to serve these platforms more than these platforms serve us, and that's kind of the heart of what I'm not trying to get everybody to log off, as healthy as that may be. I think there is a good thing, good redemptive stuff there. I think that the goal would be let's just think more clearly and ask harder questions of these platforms as we use them.
Speaker 1:I have so many questions.
Speaker 2:Let's go, let's go.
Speaker 1:So, just for that one, let's start with what you just said, and then I need to go backwards to a couple of things. But what do you think social media does for us? What should it be that it gives to our lives? So the way you just said it remind me of how you worded it. What is Facebook doing for me instead of what I'm doing for Facebook? Is that how you said?
Speaker 2:it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what should Facebook be doing?
Speaker 2:for Facebook Is that how you said it. Yeah, what should Facebook be doing for us? I think, well, I have my own qualms with Facebook. I think some of it's, actually some of the goals of Facebook, aren't inherently things that we should pursue. I don't know that we should be connected with everybody across the world. I just don't know if that's a positive thing. I think we've seen a lot of negative effects of that um. But I think what should these platforms let's just talk about social media generally like and I think different platforms have different purposes um, like I just did, I just wrote a newsletter for next tuesday on dating apps and the dominance of dating apps.
Speaker 2:Like I don't, dating apps are social media. People don't usually think of them that way, but they are. They like, through and through, dating apps or social media um that are just predicated on connecting people romantically rather than platonically or like professionally or whatever else, and so like, and I don't think dating apps are bad. Like I, the point of the piece that I wrote is really just how dominant they are and how a lot of the friends I've talked to begrudgingly use them, and with varied levels of success, and so I think every social media platform kind of has a different promise or a different goal, and so it varies, but I think using social media platforms whether it's YouTube, instagram, facebook as a means of entertainment is totally within bounds. I think that's totally fine.
Speaker 2:I think, in inappropriate measure, in the same way that we don't you know, my parents didn't want me sitting in front of my PlayStation or the television for six hours on end, like we probably. You know, I don't think it's wrong to use social media to be entertained. I think that's totally appropriate. I do think that we should be uh, be interested in how long we're doing that. I think screen time is an important thing to track, and particularly like what. What apps we're giving our screen time is an important thing to track, and particularly what apps we're giving our screen time to more than just using a screen, because I think they're not all.
Speaker 2:Screen time is created equally, I guess, is how I would say it, and so I think using the platforms to be entertained is totally cool. I think using the platforms to connect with people across the world is really helpful. There are friends who I consider friends, that 80% of our relationship is maintained by some form of social media, and I only see them a few times a year, for a few days, and the rest of our relationship is mediated by varied social media. I think that's good. I think that's a common grace of social media platforms. So I think there is a lot of good there and I think that they can be great modes of entertainment and modes of keeping connection with people. I think it's when we let them overextend beyond those uses that we um, that we start to serve them rather than them serving us.
Speaker 1:Hmm, going back to, how did social media or how did social internet evolve? Was it just, how do I say it? Was it always going to happen? Like, whoever did it, someone would have done it If it hadn't have been Mark Zuckerberg or the guy that did MySpace. Was it Tom? Was Tom the creator of MySpace? Tom, tom, oh Tom. And so what would you say was kind of the predicating factor, like the biggest shift that happened between the 1980s to now. That changed everything.
Speaker 2:What a great question. Is it funny? Yeah, myspace Tom is the one who did all this right the way everybody loves to like. Some people like to dog. Myspace tom like, oh man does. Wouldn't myspace tom like to be mark zuckerberg? Uh no, he's like a wildlife photographer living in hawaii. He got out at the right time, before everybody started talking about how social media was dismantling society. Right like he, he made his few hundred million dollars and was like I'm out. So yeah, MySpaceTime is always a fun little example. But so how did this stuff evolve?
Speaker 2:The internet's always been social and let me say you talked about social internet, social media. I want to clarify this, and I used social internet more than social media throughout the book, intentionally for this reason. Postman talked about the difference between a technology and a medium. A technology is like we all know what a technology is it's the ones and zeros, the code, the stuff that undergird, like the architecture of the internet. Um, it would be the engine of your car. That's the technology. The media, or a medium, is the way you use a technology to create culture. So the television is the technology. The television program, the news show, the reality show, the sports thing those are all media that uses the technology of the television to create culture. Social internet and social media are different things. Now I do use them interchangeably within the book to help the reader, because social internet is a very rare term, social media much more common. If I say social media, a few apps pop into your head and my head that litter our phone screens. But social internet?
Speaker 2:Using the term social internet, what I'm interested in is when we often conversations we have about social media are like oh, like funny cat videos and you probably shouldn't be looking at that kind of thing on Instagram. Or like be careful of how much time you spend on TikTok. Or like we think of individual pieces of media we consume. And I really want us to think as we think about our relationship with social media. I want us to be thinking more as much about the technologies, the algorithms, the math that serves us up that media.
Speaker 2:How does the actual technology shape us beyond just the goofy cat videos or the salacious Instagram posts or whatever else? So, anyway, I want to broaden our understanding and that's why I use that terminology. The reason it's social yeah, it was always going to be social. So to your question, like it was always going to be social because it really has been from the beginning. I mean email really existed before our modern social internet and email is inherently social. I mean the internet was created to connect researchers to be able to share information around the cold war so that, like if russia was going to nuke us, they could share information super quickly that's, that's how the fascinating yeah, that's how.
Speaker 2:That's how the first computer networks were were connected was so that government agencies and research institutions could be sharing data really fast for the time anyway. And so then, once you got into the 90s, the walled gardens cropped up. Aol was a walled garden. It was like you weren't opening up a web browser and typing in wwwwhatever. That came in the late 90s. It was in the mid 90s where we got the walled gardens, where you'd open up comp, you serve, or you'd open up prodigy or you'd open up aol, and it was like you had to type in a keyword to get to a certain spot, like you weren't just browsing on the web. Wherever you wanted, there were like certain places you could go. You could go to AOL's chat rooms. You couldn't hop onto some other. If you're using AOL. You could only use AOL's chat rooms. You couldn't hop into some other places, chats, um, and so those were the walled gardens, and the reason social blew up is because, um, frankly, I think we were just destined to use the internet to connect with other people. Like it's just human nature. And and I think, aol mailing I mean when AOL was at its peak it was the. It was producing more compact discs than any music industry in the world, right. So like AOL had more compact discs for its trial, for its free 14 day trials or 30 day trials, than any music producer at the height of CDs. And so AOL got everybody online Not I mean America, but they got America online truly. And at the center of AOL's experience was its chat and social experiences and really AOL primed us all.
Speaker 2:There's a great book called the Attention Merchants by Tim Wu. It was written a number of years ago but it's still very relevant and that's where a lot of my research for the early stages of the internet came from, and he talks a lot about how AOL was integral to what we would call the modern social internet, because it just laid so much of the groundwork for our desire to use the internet to connect to other people. Some of the other walled gardens, like CompuServe or Prodigy, were focused on online shopping, which at the time it wasn't successful because people were afraid to put their credit cards into the internet and things like that. Or it was more geared toward like super smart computer nerds. Aol was like super easy to use and focused on connecting with other people and that really kind of ushered in what came afterward and, yeah, we have what we have.
Speaker 1:Did you do any research on the way that our social media habits affect our brains, like dopamine levels or other different types of hormones, or mental health or anything like that?
Speaker 2:There's so much data and science to show that social media is designed to be addictive, and the founders and creators of the modern platforms we use, like Mark Zuckerberg of facebook and evan spiegel of instagram, have said as much like they've. They have, uh, explicitly said that these programs were designed to get us addicted. Let's say, justin timberlake um, uh, I love justin timberlake. I was gonna make a joke, but I'm not. Uh, he's awesome. I love him. He is his character.
Speaker 2:Is Sean Parker, like he plays Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook? Well, the real life, sean Parker is on record saying this in an interview in 2017. He said the thought process that went into building these applications. So just imagine Justin Timberlake saying this all right, no-transcript validation, feedback loop Exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with because you were exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors or creators me, mark Zuckerberg, kevin Systrom of Instagram, it's all of these people understood this consciously and we did it anyway. So that guy, sean Parker or Justin Timberlake also created Napster.
Speaker 2:Ironically, justin Timberlake played him because he created the platform that robbed musicians of money, but he said that the whole point of this was to hook you, to keep you coming back. And that's how these platforms make money, because they're free. The real cost of social media is that we end up serving them and and and giving them our content and our lives as a means of using them to express ourselves. So, yeah, there's, there's so much research out there by by actual great psychologists about just the behavioral psychology Like it, by actual great psychologists about just the behavioral psychology. Honestly, one of the saddest things about social media is that some of the most brilliant minds in behavioral psychology have kind of been focused on harvesting it for ad revenue, you know, like in this way, and it's yeah, so it's a big deal and it's very much there and people should be aware of it.
Speaker 1:What do you think about the metaverse?
Speaker 2:What do I think about the metaverse? When you say metaverse, what do you mean?
Speaker 1:Okay, let me just clarify this by saying I am an extremely late adopter to any technology.
Speaker 1:So, here's what I know about Metaverse that it is well. I think. I know two things Facebook has renamed their company, metaverse, and they're taking a focus on, uh like, creating a virtual life, and I think that that's paralleled with what I have seen kind of like this next level dystopian, like the 2020 us or the 2022 us. The 1984 for us, I think, is kind of more of this, like everyone's going to live their life through glasses, and that terrifies me.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah. So yeah, facebook renamed their company Meta to focus on the metaverse and they're betting the future of the company on the metaverse created by neil stevenson, a novelist, in his book snow crash, which I'm actually in the middle of reading right now. It's a pretty good novel, very like near future, dystopian. Like what's it like to live in a in a like mediated, like physical and virtual state like people live in, like if anyone's seen ready player one or the movie or read the book? Neil stevenson's snow crash was kind of like the precursor to that and less focused on video games. Ready player one's much more about video games and neil stevenson's is more just, broad. Like people live in, like the like storage centers where you like, you know people have like the u-haul storage center and there's like a bunch of cubes of storage sheds. Like people live in those things, like in this near future, in this book, um. And so he coined the term metaverse in that book. I think it was written in like the eighties I could be confused, it might be nineties, um and so he created the term and the actual definition of a metaverse.
Speaker 2:Well, a metaverse requires it to not be owned by a company, which Web 3 is like the future of the internet. So Web 1 is the pre-social internet where, like it was called the read era, where, like we would just be consuming content from the internet, we're not putting anything on the internet. That was like kind of AOL, but even like pre-AOL AOL. And then the first social media platforms like Friendster and MySpace ushered in Web 2.0, which is where we live right now. That's the read-write era of the internet, where you can both consume content from the internet and create content for the internet. That's Web 2.0. It's been since about the late 90s, 99, 2000,. And we're still in it today. But we're starting to see Web 3. Web 3 is read web three and web three is read, write and own.
Speaker 2:So where today, like three or four companies run the internet right google, facebook, amazon. Those three companies basically run the internet in some form or fashion. Microsoft also to some extent, but really mostly those three companies dominate everything and they generate most of the revenue and profit from all of our activity. They get all the money. There's a future in Web3, where there's a social media platform like Facebook, where I don't think it will be Facebook, but something like Facebook, where you go on and you post something just like you do today, but instead of it being totally free. Well, it may be free, but where they're harvesting your data and you don't get anything in return other than you just express yourself. Sure, there's very much a future. In fact, it's not really fair for me to say future, because some of these already exist. They're just not used super widely, where, for every like you get, you get a quarter.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And every comment you get, you get $0.45. And then every share, you get $0.75. And you actually get paid for your content and you're a stakeholder, which means the people who have created these platforms are making less money. They're still making money, but they're making less money. They're still making money, but they're making less money and you actually have an ownership stake in. And that's where, like, you would be paid in a cryptocurrency which is what all this crypto stuff is about and you would be paid and then you could translate that to dollars or whatever, whatever your currency is in your country. So the metaverse is like one part of Web3, what I just described and it's where, properly defined, the metaverse is not owned by a company, because the whole point is to not let a big company like Google or Facebook run everything. So the perfect metaverse is like you go onto some website imagine like an eBay of the future and you buy you really like Jordan shoes, but you don't want to buy them for your real life feet. You want to go buy Jordan shoes that you can put on a digital avatar. Because here's the thing I think this is very real and I don't think it's in three years. I think it's probably more in like 15 or 20 years. But I mean today, like I had three meetings on Zoom today, right, and that's just like FaceTime, right, or like a webcam experience. I think it's very possible and likely that in 10 to 15 years, every employee who works from home or works wherever will be issued a like VR headset in addition to their laptop and they'll participate in meetings in some form of a metaverse. But I don't think it's a metaverse purely defined. I just think it's more of like a virtual conference room rather than a zoom FaceTime experience. Does that make sense? So, like, we're already halfway there in a lot of ways? Um, because we're already meeting virtually so much today, the, the whole coronavirus thing and remote work really sped up this conversation.
Speaker 2:But to get to the metaverse, kind of, as you were thinking, um, I don't think facebook will run the metaverse as much as they want to a, because the whole point of a metaverse is to not have it be owned by a singular company. So any of these companies? First of all, the metaverse has just become a marketing tool for these companies to make their investors think they're thinking about the future. It's just become a buzzword that it's not None of them really. They just mean that they're creating a virtual reality experience that they hope will make them more money and allow them to gather more data from users.
Speaker 2:A true metaverse means you buy those virtual Air Jordans for your online avatar and you can wear them in the Microsoft version of the metaverse that you're using to go to your work meetings. I think genuinely I know this is sad, kimberly, but roll with me, sad Kimberly, but roll with me. I think this is possible where someone like me, a 30-year-old, goes to work in the Microsoft metaverse every day, where I'm going to meetings that are virtual avatars or whatever, and then when I log off, I go spend time with my family, but then when I want to play a video game or watch a movie, I go put the same headset back on. But instead of logging into the Microsoft Metaverse to go to work meetings, I log into some like the Xbox Metaverse to play video games with my friends. In the same way that somebody may work today and be on Zoom meetings all day and then, when they're done, have dinner with their family or whatever. They've got an hour of free time at night, they hop on Fortnite with their friends and they buy digital goods on there like skins for their characters or clothing items for their characters. But in the future, what this looks like is those items you buy in one metaverse for your virtual persona. In your gaming metaverse, you buy some cool shoes for your gaming character. You can equip those to your persona in your work environment. It translates across platforms.
Speaker 2:I know this sounds very weird, but I do think it's. Here's what I would say. I'm not exactly excited about it, especially if Facebook runs it, because Facebook has shown to be predatory on their users throughout their history. We didn't get into this a whole lot in our conversation, but I don't have a problem with all of these companies, but Facebook has repeatedly taken advantage of user trust to harvest data in some pretty predatory ways, lied about it and then not really apologized when they get caught. If anyone listening keeps up on Facebook. Stuff like the Facebook papers from the fall of 2021 came out and showed just how egregious their privacy issues are and all of that. So you should never trust what Facebook says about anything.
Speaker 2:They're the least trustworthy company out of all of these in my view, and I'm hoping that we don't adopt the Facebook's version of the future, but there will be some version of this, and I think it's best for us to not wring our hands and say this is so terrible because from a Christian perspective, the church kind of did that with social media and now we're decades behind in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2:And so I think it's really helpful for us to look at the metaverse or whatever this future looks like and say, well, it's not all great and there could be a lot of problems, but how can we learn to be faithful in this space and minister to people in this space, whatever that looks like and whatever form that takes, rather than just say oh, it's so bad, it's so terrible, and just ignore it, because I think we're going to end up missing out on real opportunities to serve people with the good news and serve people just in general if we just write it off. So I would encourage people not to be alarmed or overly optimistic, but to kind of keep tabs and learn and not let ourselves be taken off guard if this is a real big thing in a decade or two, and learn and not let ourselves be taken off guard if this is a real big thing in a decade or two.
Speaker 1:So here's what scares me about this whole metaverse thing. So much of healthy relationships involves face-to-face, like reading a person's emotions, touch, like the human touch, and that can never be replicated in a VR headset or a Zoom meeting, right Like that's part of what is also the struggle of a lot of people right now feeling lonely, isolated. You can join 18 Zoom meetings in a day, but if there's no one to hug you at the end of it, that's still lonely, and so I hear what you're saying. I'm going to be a late adopter I always am anyway but I think my fear is what stops people from just becoming so addicted and living their life through this thing.
Speaker 1:But then also the other thing I wanted to ask you about Web 3.0 is did I understand it right? Not from you, but from something else. I read that, um, people would also pay, so like if I had a page, then people would pay to be able to follow me Totally. How does that not make everything worse? Like we're already struggling with self-esteem and all of that, and now like would people pay to follow me? I don't even want to have to think of that question.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's definitely part of it. In fact, it's already on some platforms. Right now you can pay to follow somebody on Twitter, to have greater access to somebody on Twitter, it's called a super follow. You can pay five bucks a month or whatever they set their rate at, and then you can like have access to slide into their DMs or whatever. Like you can have a greater level access. So that's already kind of here and it will definitely come in.
Speaker 2:Yes, it exacerbates the problem. I think. I don't think distributing the wealth among everybody solves the problems with social media. Frankly, I think it'd be good for us to all. Maybe if we have a post that does really well, it'd be great to make 20 bucks from it, but I don't think that solves our deeper problems. Um, and I agree with you, uh, on the on the intimacy and the embodied presence part I. I think it's a huge problem with the future. Uh, I do think I.
Speaker 2:I do think that in a lot of conversations I've had about this, people assume we're going to go from zero to 100, where none of us are really using VR or the metaverse right now, outside of people who occasionally play some games in there or whatever. It's a very small portion of people who are actually using it, yeah, like regularly. And I think it's a little bit of a jump to say we're going to go from not and I'm, I'm an early adopter in a lot of ways of a lot of things and uh, like I don't even have a headset yet or whatever, and I I'm not going to go from, like, never using it to always wanting to live in it. I do think that could happen quite quickly, given how we've so quickly adopted other technologies. Um, but I I think there's more of a situation where, like, somebody will be, instead of looking at a camera at Zoom meetings all day. They'll be on a headset with Zoom meetings all day. They may not want to spend any time in it afterward, but they are using it regularly for that human embodiment and touch and interaction. I agree with you, obviously, 100. My fear, my, my biggest fear, is that we start to lose our taste for that. Um, one of the biggest problems I have with social media, or bigger problems I see, not with social, but more with like, not with social media, but more with our relationship with social media one of my biggest concerns, I think part of the reason we find social media so appealing and you'll appreciate this, given what you do and the nature of your podcast, and I think hopefully folks listening will appreciate, will understand this what social media offers us whether it does or not is another question, but what it offers us is a feeling of being loved and appreciated without the fear of vulnerability and intimacy.
Speaker 2:So social media offers us unlimited ability to feel padded on the back, to feel encouraged. Perhaps we even get DMs from people that if we're single might be flattering but if we're married might be. Like I'm married. We have the ability to feel others' affection quite easily on the internet without ever having to be truly known by them, and for a lot of reasons. I think part of the reason social media is so beyond the brain psychology and dopamine hacking stuff we talked about, I think part of the reason social media is so appealing to folks is it offers the ability to experience affection without the fear and vulnerability of true intimacy.
Speaker 2:With true intimacy comes vulnerability, um, and I think a lot of folks fear. True, we want to be loved, but we're afraid to be known. Keller talks about this a bit in meaning of marriage, that that, uh, in marriage sometimes we're, we're, um, we're. We want to be loved, but we're afraid to truly show ourselves and truly be known. And I think the internet, the social internet and our various social media platforms just offer such an easy form of feeling like we're loved without feeling like we ever have to be truly known. So my fear, kimberly, is that if this progresses, because we're already experiencing that sort of like disembodiment and wanting relationship without intimacy and without touch, we're already headed down that road in some really troubling ways.
Speaker 2:And what will be interesting to see?
Speaker 2:When this inevitably comes because we can't stop it like it's going to happen and perhaps in our lifetimes maybe not, maybe things slow down, but it looks like it's going to happen within the next 20 years. If that happens, what will be interesting to see is do we lean into this and do people start to forsake any interest in wanting true intimacy because it's just so hard and so messy and so vulnerable and scary, or that would be a worst case scenario. Or do we get to this VR, metaverse, screen, mediated future and we realize how terrible it is collectively, some of us, I hope, would still be holdouts even if a lot of other people adopted it. But what if, collectively, we realize, oh man, this promised future of screen-mediated living that everybody talked about being awesome. It is not. It it's terrible. Then we recoil and maybe we reclaim the importance and vitality of true embodied intimacy. That would be a glorious, wonderful revelation and experience. But I think it's just going to be interesting to see what happens when that inevitably comes. Which way will we swing? And I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because as much flack as Facebook has gotten I mean for the past several years, but even just this past year people still don't get off of it. There are some right Like, there's some that do, and all of that, but overall we still use it with all of its known issues, all of its predatory behaviors and everything. And so that's what I think of when I think of, like would we actually get to a point at some point in some time with some kind of virtual tech that we say no, like we're really done? Can we overcome the addiction collectively?
Speaker 2:And it's. You know, I hesitate to ever say like we're all addicted to social media because it's sweeping and again, I'm not a psychologist, I can't diagnose this. But the best way to know if you're addicted to something, I think just like practically speaking, is if you keep using it and keep doing it, despite hating it. I mean, it's exactly what you just described. If we find ourselves I keep going back to this, I keep doing it and I hate it, I hate what it does to me, I hate the way it makes me feel, I hate who I am when I'm on it, um, I think that's as sure a sign as any that maybe do here for ourselves now, in the space that we're in.
Speaker 1:I don't even know how to finish this sentence. Yeah, what do we do? What do we do? That's the question. What do we?
Speaker 2:do. Yeah, I think I'm going to share another concern I have on the way to saying what I think we do. I think I'm going to share another concern I have on the way to saying what I think we do. I think another kind of deep, like undercurrent concern that I have is that online life has become primary and offline life has become secondary. It used to be that what happened on the Internet flowed downstream from what happened off of the internet. The internet reflected what happened in the real world quote, unquote real world, as if the internet wasn't real. What we need to realize is that an unfortunate shift has happened, that we have started to look at the online life as primary and the offline life as secondary. We've started to see our offline lives as a means of harvesting content for who we want to present ourselves to be online.
Speaker 2:Bo Burnham is a famous comedian and entertainer and director. He has a special on Netflix called Inside that came out in late 2020 or mid-2021,. I want to say and it's very, quite vulgar, I need to say up front, and so I can't like explicitly recommend it because it's there are definitely things in there that are objectionable. However, it is incredibly insightful to where we're at with a lot of this stuff. And and he actually directed a movie called Eighth Grade a number of years ago which depicts the eighth grade experience very accurately, and when he was giving an interview around what it's like to be a modern eighth grader, he did this movie. All the eighth graders in the movie are actually eighth graders and what's funny is the movie's rated R but it depicts the eighth grade experience and it's a rated R movie but it's like, yeah, the eighth grade experience is pretty rated R these days and so it's kind of funny that an eighth grader couldn't actually go see a movie about their own experience. But anyway, he says this and I think, but also taking inventory and being a viewer of your own life, like living an experience at the same time, hovering behind yourself and watching yourself live that experience, being nostalgic for moments that haven't happened yet, planning your future to look back on it, these are all really weird dissociative things that I think are new because of the specific structure of social media and how it dissociates ourselves from ourselves, and I think it's a really kind of pertinent point that he says later. He actually says this in Inside that comedy special.
Speaker 2:I talked about world, the non-digital world. So the offline world is merely a theatrical space in which one stages and records content for the much more real, much more vital digital space. And you just think, like, people go on vacations because it creates great Instagram content, or they design their wedding specifically with the hashtag in mind, or things like that. So where do we go from here? I think we reverse that trend. That's where I think we go from here.
Speaker 2:I don't think logging off and deleting your accounts fixes the problem. Now, that may help you with your addiction, like if you're finding you're enslaved, that can help. You're still going to hear about what happened on Facebook or what happened on Twitter or whatever else, because your friends are going to talk about it, the news will talk about it or whatever. You can't escape it. It's the water in which we swim. We can only try to swim as wisely as we can, I suppose you could say and put our gas masks on if the water seems a bit toxic sometimes.
Speaker 2:So I think what we do is we root ourselves in the real, in the offline, and that looks like going for walks and maybe not taking your phone. Or if, for safety, you want to take your phone, you just don't take headphones and you keep your phone in your pocket. I think it looks like studying history and trying to learn what was life like before I had my nose in my phone all the time. I think it looks like having real friendships, that you meet with people real life, in person. In the same way, you describe the importance of an embodied presence. I think it looks like having accountability with friendships, who, people who can ask you how your, how your faith life is going and how, uh, how your relationship with your spouse is going, how your relationship with your phone is going.
Speaker 2:I think it's. It's about like letting people into your life and not fearing intimacy and the vulnerability that comes with that Um and and so I think it's. I think it's a handful of things. Really, what it comes down to, in my view, is letting who you are on the internet and what you do on the internet take a backseat to what you do offline. And that might sound simple and it might sound ridiculous that anybody would let their online lives govern who they are offline, but I think enough of us probably realize how easily that can happen and maybe we realize how it's happened in some ways in our own life. So, yeah, I think we just try to reclaim our offline lives and make them primary, rather than our online lives primary.
Speaker 1:I love it. Chris Martin, his book is Terms of Service the Real Cost of Social Media. Fantastic conversation, oh my goodness. I loved every minute. Could ask you 1800 more questions if you're listening.
Speaker 2:look, it's not like a fun butterflies and rainbows conversation. I understand. If you want to be encouraged, call me up, hit me up on Twitter. I give you an encouraging word. But I think it's important for us to just be honest about this stuff, and I think a lot of us are pretty well acquainted with how social media can be fun. I think we get that. We've all had some fun there. Look, tiktok is my favorite platform right now and I'm kind of ashamed of it, but there are so many talented people that are hilarious and very good at singing or whatever. But I think we would all be better off if we started to take a more sobering look. So I hope it's not been too discouraging for any of you guys. But yeah, that's what I hope to do here.
Speaker 1:That's good. Now where can people find you Find the book? I know it's on Amazon. Is that where you prefer people buy it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really care what folks buy, when people buy wherever they like to buy books. Honestly, buy wherever you can get the best price. Like I don't care. I'm not not trying to buy a boat or anything like that. I just want anybody to. I just I just want anybody to be helped by the book that can that can be helped by it, helped by the book that can be helped by it. So, yeah, find it. It's on Amazon, I think. Anywhere you want to buy a book you should be able to find it. Barnes and Noble, all those different sites, christianbookcom, I think I saw they had the best deal the other day, so you can find one there.
Speaker 2:And on social media, twitter is the primary place I engage with folks that I don't know personally. So I tend to reserve Facebook and Instagram for folks I actually know in real life, go figure. But then Twitter is kind of my outpost, my perch to the wider world. So I'm on Twitter at ChrisMartin17. And you can find me there. I love chatting about this stuff with folks and DMing about it or emailing or whatever. So don't hesitate to reach out and happy to talk about whatever.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Speaker 2:Of course, thanks for having me.
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