Written by: David Weston on April 9, 2025

I was smitten after reading excerpts from both Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan’s book as well as Jonathan Haidt’s journal articles on the impact of Social Media, Artificial Intelligence, and the collective impact of these two cataclysmic technologies on our modern societies. This particular statement gave me much pause and elicited some of my own soul-searching concerning how our culture is responding to their proliferation and how they are transforming our society in some of the most destructive ways. “Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.”

Social Networks, Strong Institutions, and shared stories are the three primary forces that bind us all together.[1] I am struck by how each of these forces in the past has been held together by intense communication. Human relationships are secured together with the glue of articulation. When that adhesive begins to lose its bonding strength, relationships will fall apart. What is that glue? It is trust. Our communities are losing their ability to trust. With the advent of Social Media and the creation of Artificial Intelligence, it has become progressively and rapidly easier to erode the line between truth and lies. The previous generations were bent on holding on to, at a minimum, a facsimile of truth. It was a mirror each of us could look into as a barometer and gain some semblance of confidence that we were truth-bearers.

The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile. It’s mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another. Haidt’s depiction and recounting of the development of social media and artificial intelligence is written concisely and with great clarity.

He vividly describes why there is so much anger in our society today and describes several significant ways our lives are being influenced, and not for the good of our culture.[3] I am not a naturally angry person. It just is not in my temperament. As a new follower of Christ back in 1981, I came across a scripture passage that basically found its way deep into my psyche. The passage can be found in James 1, verses 18-19, Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; ²⁰ for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. I remember determining as a young man that I was going to ask God to engrain that reality into my soul. I determined to release any angry tendencies I had into His hands. It was a liberating process, one which I have never forgotten.[4]

This is probably why anger seems like such a foreign concept to me. Everywhere I look, I see lots of anger. My 15-year-old grandson is dealing with a lot of anger these days. His frustration seems to be nested in not feeling understood. I know much of it is transitional from adolescence to manhood. But I have also noted that much of his anger is with his peers and others in authority over him. Many of those relationships are laced with the pungent aroma of social media and non-virtual communication.

Neil Postman wrote, “They told us to avoid getting too caught up in analyzing the content people were viewing and to think more about the ways that the medium itself (the technology we create) changes who we are and how we think and act.”[2] In my opinion, that is a profound statement. Experience tells us that few are actually producing original content on Social Media. Much of what is being written is actually regurgitated knowledge that has not been personally digested and put to use. Both Haidt and Postman’s analysis is that most of what we see content-wise is confirmation bias and is not built on original thought but on gripping tighter to what we already believe, which is usually the result of someone whose name we know and we have built a bridge of trust with them through our friends, colleagues and perhaps more importantly, family.

1. Haidt, Jonathan. “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” The Atlantic, May 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/.

2. “Smash The Technopoly! Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan,” After Babel (Substack). December 19, 2024. https://www.afterbabel.com/p/smash-the-technopoly?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=2cgdda&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email.

3. Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. New York: Penguin Press, 2024.
4. “Building a Bridge of Trust.” Catholic Life, Diocese of La Crosse, May 21, 2019. https://catholiclife.diolc.org/2019/05/21/building-a-bridge-of-trust/#:~:text=The%20first%20task%20of%20evangelization,them%20to%20retrace%20their%20steps.

5. Haidt, Jonathan. “End the Phone-Based Childhood Now.” The Atlantic, March 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-childhood-smartphone-use-mental-health-effects/677722/.

About the Author

David Weston