Last night I watched the documentary Captivated, a film warning about the dangers of over consumption of
media. The documentary explained how our brains our hardwired to focus on
anything that moves; probably a reflex to protect us from danger. However, the
screens move all the time, so we are always watching. And, while we think we
are relaxing, the documentary explained, we are not. We are having brain
exhaustion and draining while doing nothing. It explained that the average
child consumes over 50 hours of media a week. Such amounts of excess brain stimulations
is harmful for many reasons.
Media is not a real world that we interact with, it is
something that is in front of us, a virtual world. We watch things we do not
really enjoy, simply because we are glued to it. We are always so bored, and we
think we watch, log on, or view because we are having fun.
The dangers are there and very, very evident. But besides the
risks involved in such mass consumption, what is on the screen, what we are
experiencing, is portraying worldviews that we really do not agree with.
Mass killings, where the object of the game is to destroy, to
rob, to blow things up. Virtual war games which people spend hours of time
playing, reminds one of the coliseums. Many Americans would not go to the Roman
Games, but we will go to them in our virtual worlds.
“Man is
lost and lonely in the postmodern world.”-Francis Schaeffer.
The real world is not a great place to live in the postmodern
world. We have to get away from our decaying society, so we escape into a
virtual world. It is easier; we can always start over if we mess up after all.
In the real world we may be dead beat bums, but in the game world we feel that
we are accomplishing something.
The Christians usually either run from the virtual world,
which includes internet, or they embrace the madness. The Christian
worldview-the true one that Scriptures lay down-calls on us to take all things
under subjection for Christ. That includes everything, because the earth is the
Lords and the fullness thereof. (Psalm 24:1) So whether it is cows or computer
clicks, all must be brought under the headship of the God of the universe. There
are other things to accomplish than killing the most zombies or growing the most
crops on Farmville. A world of 0s and 1s should not control us.
Mankind existed for almost 6,000 years without Facebook, we
can too for a while. Staring at a screen usually accomplishes nothing.
To view the virtual world properly, we must look at every
aspect of it from the viewpoint of how we can take dominion of it and use for
the glory of our creator. If it is so distorted that nothing can be made of it
then abandon it.
Television is not completely bad. Groucho Marx found it very
educational. He said every time someone switched it on; he went into another
room and read a book, maybe we should to.
Andrew C. Abbott
Notes:
1: From his autobiographical sketch Something of myself.
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