Rector's letter for March Fowey News
Dear Friends
The government is proposing that the UK should follow Australia in banning social media for under 16’s as well as tightening regulation to protect children online. In a February article on Substack, the Prime Minister wrote, “In the past 20+ years, social media has evolved to become something completely different from the simple, stripped-back pages it was in its conception. And in that evolution, it has become something that is quietly harming our children.”
The web is a British invention, so this is a problem of our own making, and its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, recently offered some thoughts in a talk in Oxford on how the internet has, and is, evolving: It began with the great hope that the web would be a free-flowing sharing of information, connecting people across the world in a feast of learning. No-one imagined back then that it would be colonised by rage and porn, or captured by big data companies, harvesting our data and manipulating our lives.
Few other technologies would have been introduced without rigorous assessment on the potential effects on users. Imagine releasing a car onto the market that hadn't been thoroughly scrutinised. Yet here we are, with smartphones scrambling the heads and attention spans of our children.
It is hard to escape the notion that the web is like a garden of Eden, in which the forbidden fruit has been well and truly plucked, eaten and the pith thrown away. As a result, the internet, like the human heart, is a mix of the good, hopeful and positive alongside the dark, twisted and malign. The genie is out of the bottle. The toothpaste is out of the tube. And it can't be put back as it once was. Tim Berners-Lee offered the world a blank canvas and it’s not surprising people have painted some beautiful, and some pretty ugly pictures on it.
So, what do we do? TBL’s advice was simple: you just have to avoid some stuff. You have to take steps to reduce your digital distraction. Whether you’re a creator or a consumer, you need to resist temptation. In a word: self-control. The very thing that observing Lent is meant to develop. The 40 day period (‘Lent’) that runs up to Easter Day, by longstanding Christian tradition and practice, is a period for the exercise of self-control, fasting and self-discipline.
And that is hard when the cornucopia of information - the images, words, offers, enticements and temptations of the web - has deluged us when our capacity for self-control is at a low ebb. One of the weakness of modern liberal societies, which encourage expressive individualism, is an incapacity to foster self-governance. Our culture may offer us a plethora of choice, but having severed its moorings from a Christian worldview, it has little to offer in guiding us how to pick wisely. In fact, the internet is full of people trying to monetise our lack of self-control.
Regulation is perhaps needed but I suggest it can only take us so far. The unscrupulous will always find a way around it. A renewed recognition of the importance for moral restraint would be welcome. But actually what is required is a supernatural transformation of our hearts and desires, which only Jesus can offer since it is the fruit of his Spirit at work in individuals which produces love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
with every blessing
Philip