Reels aren't Reality

Everyone should have the right to express their opinion. But my goodness, why do we listen to so many of them? The explosion of influencer culture in the past 15-20 has created echo chambers, breeding grounds of conspiracies, and cults of personality like no other time in history. Loud voices, streaming for hours on end every day, spouting ideas and infecting susceptible minds. At best, they are vacuous noise, posting entertaining click bait for money. At worst, they are maliciously spreading harmful ideologies and misinformation in order to cause division.

We’re all susceptible to it. Unless completely offline, the algorithms feed us whatever keeps us interested. But I’ve never been able to understand the parasocial relationships that develop around podcasters and content creators, especially those who have no expertise on which they speak. Some of these people generate hours of content a day; who is listening to all of that? Apparently, millions are. It baffles me.

I particularly find this phenomenon interesting in the Church. Christian/Catholic content creators, just talking and talking, spreading ideas that may or may not be that grounded in the faith, influencing millions of people. Why should I take this person’s interpretation as truth? How have they earned my time and money?

I think people are drawn to this type of content because it is easy: it’s available whenever, wherever you want it. It talks about things that your real-life community doesn’t, be that politics or scripture or a specific interest. It’s convenient and tailor-made and asks nothing but your attention.

It creates these echo chambers where small things are magnified and distorted. Whole online communities will be up in arms over situations the everyday person has no idea about or no opinion on. It becomes harder for in-person communities to connect when everyone has already committed to ideological online tribes. We start to see our neighbors through distorted lenses, based on the rhetoric of content creators who make money off our loyalty and outrage.

But those content creators aren’t coming to your door when you’re sick. They aren’t hugging you at your mother’s funeral. They aren't helping you move. They aren’t filling bags at the food pantry with you or singing Christmas carols on Christmas Eve with you or inviting you to the bar on a Friday night. It’s content, not connection.

And it isolates you from the people actually around you when everyone is plugged into different media, being told different stories and different interpretations and different “hot takes” of what is right, what is important, who is a threat, and how things “really” are.

Pope Leo recently spoke about this phenomenon last week to members of the International Youth Advisory Body:

“You know that in recent years many young people have approached the faith through social media, successful programs and popular online Christian witnesses. The danger is that a faith discovered online is limited to individual experiences, which may be intellectually and emotionally reassuring, but are never ‘embodied.’ Such experiences remain ‘disembodied,’ detached from the ‘ecclesial body.’ Nor are they lived alongside others in real-life situations, relationships or sharing. All too often, social media algorithms merely create a sounding board for individuals, picking up on personal preferences and tastes, and ‘sending them back’ magnified and enriched with appealing proposals. Yet, everyone remains alone with themselves, prisoners of their own inclinations and projections.”

In short, touch grass.

There is a lot of good that can come from online communities and finding connections with like-minded people separated by distance. But we have to be cautious of falling into cults of online influencers, letting a toxic ideology invade reel by reel. We have to learn how to question what we’re being told, who and where it’s coming from, why they may want us to react to that content. We need to let truth guide us in forming our opinions. We need to put down the phone, take a deep breath, and be present.