Social Media Poisoning

I was born in the year 1977. As a child of the 80s, I was a major target of television advertising, and I can still sing jingles and rattle off different slogans that were written for kids just like me. Let’s face it: advertising works. We were all constantly begging our parents for the latest toys and gadgets that we had seen in TV ads, and companies knew that they had tapped into a goldmine of consumers as they watched their bottom lines soar. Realizing that they had a few hours on Saturday mornings to reach this hugely influencial kid market, they created ads that were bright, filled with kids like us playing with the latest and greatest. One of the main messages that advertisers used is familiar to us today: If you don’t own this product, you’re missing out.

I remember when the Cabbage Patch Kid craze happened. It was Christmas, 1983. Television ads revealed that these “kids” were born in a cabbage patch all in one night, and the company had to find homes for all of them. The dolls came with names on birth certificates, and when your kid arrived, you never knew which features it may be blessed with. Some had blonde, curly hair. Others had two little teeth showing. Some had freckles, and others had long braids. The short marketing stint that promoted these dolls worked so well that the company had to pull the ads because they couldn’t keep up with the demand. My mother still tells stories about how much fun she had that Christmas season trying to track down a doll for me. In the end, a salesperson had stashed the last doll in the store in the back of the storeroom, and maybe she was looking for one mom who was having fun in her search. For whatever reason, she chose my mom, and this worker who was probably having too much fun herself secretly slipped the doll to her. Mom made her way to the cash register and high-tailed it out of there before a crazed Cabbage Patch shopper realized she had gotten her hands on one. All of this, because of a few TV spots that caused a sensation among the elementary school set.

Given that I grew up in such a culture, you would think that I would be pretty unaffected by advertising. But as the world changed and the ways that we communicate changed, advertising shifted. With the advent of social media in the past decade, advertisers suddenly found themselves with practically unlimited opportunities to get products in front of social media users. In an average day, just think about how many ads you see. But it isn’t just ads in the shape of traditional commercials. So much of advertising now is “influencers” doing what they do: influencing. But the basic strategy hasn’t changed. The messaging is still: If you don’t own this product, you’re missing out.

Now imagine you’re a preteen girl. You join the social media world, and for as many hours as you engage in communication there, you are subjected to advertising about every eight seconds. That’s shocking enough, but throw in the reality that many, maybe even most of the ads that are targeting a preteen girl are skincare, makeup, clothing, and hair products. How might your hours on social media shape how you think and who you are?

If you want to get an idea, I may be able to help, because while I am not a preteen girl, I am a middle-aged woman. And the social media algorithms place me squarely in the category of woman who wishes she were younger. Every eight seconds on social media, for me, looks and sounds like this: a woman in her twenties delicately applies face cream as she says, “No one wants wrinkles.” A sad looking older woman tugs at the skin around her eyes, lamenting the fact that she has bags. A celebrity shows me her beauty routine, carefully holding the products so that I can read their labels and click the links below. Unhappy-looking women hide their bellies in shapewear and find the meaning of life when they can fit so perfectly into that sexy dress. Botoxed boutique owners call me “babe” while they show me how my rear end could look if I bought these jeans which are, of course, “the holy grail of denim.”

Everywhere I go on social media, even when I am there to try to do good and be connected with my friends and the people in our community and our church family, I am bombarded with evidence that I should be dissatisfied with my hair, my face (especially my eyes, my lips, my skin, my forehead), my neck, my breasts, my belly, my legs, and even the rough spots on my feet. Every day that I engage with social media is a day that I will face critiques in my own mind and heart literally from head to toe. As a Christian, I can’t begin to explain how disorienting, discouraging, distracting, and disappointing that this is day in and day out. As usual, the advertising is designed to make me remember: If you don’t own this product, you’re missing out. And as a middle-aged woman, I have chased products and promises from companies who care nothing about me as a person. They are only trying to cause dissatistfaction in my heart so that I will give them my money. And with each product that I try that promises to reverse aging, I remember that nothing reverses aging. Aging people are going to age.

Now think back on that preteen. What might her social media advertising be about? How are advertisers teaching these girls to be dissatisfied with everything about their faces and bodies and souls? How are companies modeling that a girl’s worth is in her desirability, in her bra size, in her makeup skills? How are corporations who care nothing about our daughters convincing them that nothing matters more than how they look? Could it be that women young and old are being spiritually poisoned by the incessant advertising that floods our daily interactions on social media? Is it possible that we are being fed the lie that no one is allowed to grow old anymore, and if you do you are of no real value? Or that no one is allowed to be a normal teenager with acne and not great hair and clothes that leave room for improvement? That only a filtered face is worth looking at?

If we aren’t careful, Christian women will wake up one day and realize that are worshipping at the altar that the advertisers built for us. What a cheap alternative to the kind of abundant life that Jesus talked about. Our hearts are being poisoned by social media, but not in the ways that we once feared they would be. We thought that seeing highlight reels of our friends’ perfectly behaved kids would be the problem. We thought that the constant glut of unfiltered opinions would be the problem. We thought that rude comments would be the problem. And while all of those things can be issues that harm us spiritually, none can compare to the 10,000 targeted ads that the average social media user sees in a day. If we are living in a spiritual battle zone, wouldn’t it be just like our enemy to use something as benign as advertising to lead us away from the things of God? So clever. So easy.

I’m not advocating that we all quit social media and try to pretend like it’s the 80s. But, could we be more careful about what we allow to influence our hearts? Could we be more discerning, more in tune with God’s ways and less involved in the world’s ways? Could we take a hard look at how much stock we put in the word of social media influencers and advertisers?

On Christmas morning, 1983, I woke up to a Cabbage Patch doll with long brown braids. I was thrilled. I carried her everywhere for a few weeks, but before long, the thrill was gone. I didn’t let her sit next to me on the bus when I was in junior high or take her to college with me. It can be an empty feeling when a product promises so much but winds up just being another thing, just like all of the other things that are sitting around your house. Jesus promises so much more than stuff. So much more, even, than youth or beauty. We can’t let the people who want to take our money tell us what we need or who we are or who we need to be. Jesus offers everything. Why do we want to settle for so much less?