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South Bay SDA Church

Dan Towar

Patsy Towar

God Fearing Families

Diana Grakov

Parenting with a Purpose

Parenting with an Eternal Purpose

Keith Detwieler

Social Me Me Media


All right, so we're going to talk about social media a little bit. And by the title, you kind of catch my drift. Social media is very me-focused. Probably most of you are aware that it is. And I mean that in 2 ways.

1 way that I mean that is the content that's produced many times, oftentimes, is centered around me. However, it's also me centered in the way that I exert influence, right? And so, well, this is a social media talk. I wanna broaden that a little bit and really talk about the principle is influence as it applies to social media and media in general. What is influence?

Well this is from the Oxford dictionary. It says it is the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself. For example, the influence of television violence. So that's what influence is. And when you look at that term you say wow influence.

Well, it can affect the character. It can affect development It can affect behavior. Those are very Important things in each 1 of our lives that we need to guard and be aware of This Article I'd pulled up. This is from Harvard. It's from their Kennedy School, which is for women in public policy.

They were looking at using a radio program in Mexico to influence the people there because they have a high incidence of Violence and aggression towards women and so they started looking at well, what can we do to help influence? That group so they started a radio program that would Combat that the very first line in this document that they produce said this Media has the power to influence beliefs attitudes and behaviors All right. So it's a very powerful tool. Of course as any powerful tool You have to be wise and careful how you use it. So, you may have had a birthday before, right?

Everybody in here has had a birthday. And if you've ever had a birthday, you get this question, right? What do you want? Now, you may not be asked that question so much now as you're a little bit older but if you're younger you heard this question a lot for your birthday right what do you want why did they ask you that Why do people ask you what you want for your birthday? Yeah, it is centered about you.

It's a social expectation. Social expectation, yeah. And people genuinely want to please you, right? They want to do something for you that's pleasing. And social media companies are interested in this question, what do you like?

Because this is the fastest way that they can understand you. You are essentially giving them the information that they need to run their business. So you may sign up. This is from TikTok, and you can see on the screen, and I'll ask you, what are your interests? Right?

That's 1 of the first things out of the gate. You sign up and they used to start picking all your interests, you're really helping them out. And you might say, well, I'm interested in food or comedy or bicycles or what have you. And so you pick your interests. And then guess what kind of content you're going to be served?

The content that you like, right? And almost immediately, especially on TikTok, it's very noted for, you're prompted to pick something right away, like pick a video that you like. So as soon as you start picking on that video, they're measuring a myriad of variables. And those variables are, how long did you watch that video? They're asking, they're looking at, you know, what did you click on?

What part of the screen did you click on? They're measuring tons of variables about this experience. And from there, then they're shaping using an algorithm, what to serve you next. And the way people are starting to describe this is like, it's like they were reading my mind. So, notice at the very top, you can see there's a skip button where you could actually skip this section.

Look at how small it is. That's about user experience. And it's purposeful in design. They really don't want you to skip that part. They want to know what your interests are, because it's important to their bottom line.

Here's another 1. This is from Pinterest. They do the same thing. Tell us what you're interested in. It's a very common pattern for social media companies to ask you what it is that you're interested in.

Or, through your user habits, they will find out very quickly what you're interested in, and you'll start to see that pop up in your feed more and more. I could use a personal example. I went to Morocco a number of years ago, and at the time I was using my Twitter account more often than not. And so I was signed in on my Twitter account. I got on the hotel Wi-Fi.

I went and I looked, and all of a sudden my feed had dramatically changed. I was being served very local content content that was Largely for Morocco, but wasn't very relevant to me But based on my location They thought it was relevant to me. And if you've ever been on YouTube before, you know they have a trending page. I did the same thing. I wasn't signed into my YouTube account.

I went on YouTube, hotel wifi got on, went to the trending page. I had never heard of that stuff in my life. And I'm wondering, how can this possibly be what's trending in the world? I've never heard of these things. They're not relevant to me at all.

And so it quickly proved that point that you're getting a personalized view of the world using social media. At their core, they are businesses, right? And so businesses have essentially 1 purpose. What do they want to do largely? They want money, right?

It's very simple. And so You know as the saying goes if you're not paying for the product you are the product, right? Which if most of these are free and most of them are, then guess who's the product? You and I, right? And so they exist to make money and the longer that they can keep you on, the more money they can make.

Now some of them you might have noticed the recent trend. For example, Twitter Blue. Now there's a subscription. You don't want to see ads. You want to post this or that.

You know, they're going to put you on a subscription. YouTube's doing the same thing. They did it a lot more slowly. But if you get on YouTube now, you'll notice, you know, you watch a YouTube video. There's almost always 2 Mandatory ads that you cannot skip.

Why is that? Well, that's because they want your interest They're selling that advertising to other individuals and they're gonna get their money either way Either through the ad that's served or the subscription that you pay for. They exist to make money. So conflict of interest runs high when money is your bottom line. Another article I'd come across recently was looking at digital advertising spend.

And so we know that things are about money by looking at digital advertising spend. So we can see the numbers here. This was in 2001 And digital advertising spend was about $189 billion for digital advertising. Now, if I were to give you $200, or ask you to spend $200 and say, spend $200, most of you are probably not thinking, I'm just really ready to spend $200. But if you knew every single time you spent $200, you'd make $50 on top of that.

Would you spend the $200? I mean, you'd spend that money to make 250. You bet you would every time, because every time you spend it, you get a return. That's essentially what they're doing. And they're noticing that it actually happens.

I'm sorry, we have a small screen, so this is hard to see. But they noted, even we were surprised at the degree of acceleration that their business model is growing. And so when you look at advertising spend revenue, we're seeing in 2021 that it was a $50 billion industry across social media platforms. So that's a lot of money. You spend $200 billion, you make $50 billion.

No brainer, right? You would absolutely do it. And so it's in their best interest to advertise to you. And so basically what they're doing is they're selling your time, right? Or rather, they're profiting from you giving your time to them.

And so that should make you ask the question, what do I get out of it? Right, what do I get out of that? When we look at media in general, there is a growing concern, not just of time, but influence, like I was alluding to earlier. And so influence, for example, is the reason why China and other countries censor American content for their People because it doesn't align with their values in the media. This is a recent article from the LA Times First line or 1 of the first lines the despicable me franchise is known for flipping the script on Children's movies by making the bad guys the heroes Okay, that's not a that's not a little light studios thing.

That's not I made that up. This is the LA Times, a very public, secular news group flat out telling you, they're doing this. They're not shy about it. They're doing it. They're flipping the script.

And when it comes to that influence, China says, we don't want that. Take it out. And they comply. Right? So but that's a 2 way street.

You also see this from the FBI FBI released a statement in 2020 that said that China was attempting to influence US institutions, right, through a variety of means and methods, not just social media, but in general. And so you have 2 countries, right, China, they don't want our media influence. The US, We don't want China's influence in our institutions or what have you. They're both warring over this idea of influence. Who's going to influence 1 or the other?

They see that as a big issue. They see it as very important. And I dare say We should see it as very important, especially as God's people in these last days. What kind of influence are we exerting? What kind of influence are we allowing in our lives?

And so in this document that the FBI released they use this term influence 16 times to talk about what was going on with China. Robert Cialdini wrote a book. I believe he published this in 1984. And he was a psychologist looking at the idea of influence. This is 1 of his quotes from his book.

He said, we use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves. And he may have written this before social media tech took off, but I think this still applies today very well. It's a principle. And so if what I see is affirmed, right, when you see that like button increasing on and on and on, right, then I try to do the same because we're influenced by what we see and we try to imitate those things. And when we do this, the way social media works, it's that's how I find my self-worth, right?

By other people affirming me doing those things. And, you know, it really begs the question, should our self-worth be coming from likes? Because what happens once the likes stop? Then what happens to our self-worth? It goes away.

So this influence idea runs far and wide. We exert an influence on other people by the way we use social media and whatever we consume is exerting an influence on each 1 of us. That's why it's very important that we look at this principle and say, you know, be careful little eyes what you see, be careful little ears what you hear. It's a one-way scenario, right? And really what's going on is the wrong way and it really should be going another way.

This is the way the Bible puts it. In Romans 12, too, it says, and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is good and acceptable and the perfect will of God." So, the Bible tells us we really should be discovering what's God's will, and that's what should be influencing us and letting that be our guide instead of the other way around. So another quote from Chaldeans book was this, in the process of examining the reactions of other people to resolve our uncertainty. However, we are likely to overlook a subtle but important fact. Those people are probably examining the social evidence too.

So here we are looking to other people. We're looking at their behavior. We're looking at their ideas. We're looking at how they observe and interact with the world. And oftentimes we think, well, because they're doing it, they're right.

And he's saying, that's not necessarily true. They're just interacting the same way that you are. And so if you take what they're doing as gospel truth and implement it in your own life, you could be going down a very dangerous road. And so, just like the adage about jumping off a bridge, right? Just because you see everybody else jumping off a bridge doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

The Bible says this, especially geared toward young people, let no 1 despise your youth. How many young people need to be reading this today? Let no 1 despise you, but be an example to the believers in word, in conduct, in love, in spirit, in faith, and in purity. That speaks volumes. There's a lot wrapped up in those words.

There's everything from what you say to what you do, your emotional intelligence, how you put yourself out and in your relationship with God toward other people. So this is what we need to be living by. So Chialdini had this idea. You might call it a social theory. And it was called Social Proof.

And in Social Proof, he described how people behaved based on influence. And there were some principles that I want to look at that he puts forth in his book so that we can choose what it is that influences us. The first principle he put forth was uncertainty which basically was when we're faced with an unfamiliar situation an unsure individual would feel the need to refer to other people for guidance. Just what we talked about. So you don't really know what to do and so what do you do?

What's everybody else doing? Right? We know that statistically most people follow the crowd. They're actually not leaders, especially in a crisis situation. He also talked about the principle of similarity.

And so you're more likely to adopt the behavior of those around you. You're more likely to do what it is that other people around you are doing if you can identify with them. So that could be things like school. It could be things like community, physical appearance, whatever common experience that you have. You're more likely to let those people influence you because of their similarities.

And so you know how it is, we usually do what our peers do. So we'll get questions at the end, Derek, okay? If we have time. There's also the idea of expertise, right? So if you see an authority figure or an expert on a topic, you are more likely to do what it is that expert figure is telling you to do.

Now, I don't know if this is necessarily holding true today, but this was part of the social proof. The idea is that you essentially think that they're more familiar with the situation than you are, so you listen to them. And then number. This is obviously 1 that makes sense, right? You know, if there's a lot of people doing it, you know, if everybody's jumping off the bridge like we talked, then that must be the thing to do.

You know, we'll jump off the bridge because there's so many people doing it. So we should do the same thing. And so for the observer, that seems to be the more correct point of view. And, You know, it makes me wonder, where do all these principles come into play? There's a scenario in the Bible where they all come into play.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, right? If you were there, there were probably your peers. There were authority figures. There were a lot of people. There were all these variables that he talked about.

There were people there, I'm sure, who were uncertain. Right? So what did they do? Wow. Time is brutal.

Time is brutal. They did largely what everybody else did, but that's not what God's people did. All right, I'm gonna read this Quote from the youth's instructor. Pay attention, I think this is a powerful quote. It says, from every human being, there goes forth an influence that either gathers with Christ or scatters with him.

Our every action, our every word exerts an influence either for good or for ill. This influence affects the eternal destiny of those with whom we associate. Influence and example, when viewed in the light of the cross and in their true relation to eternity, assume infinite importance. That's heavy. A word fitly spoken, an action rightly done, may save a soul from death.

Day by day the example we set and the influence we exert are registered in the records going before to judgment. The child of God must never forget that he is only part of the whole. He is only a thread in the web of humanity. And here she wraps it up. Everything he does makes an impression on his character and influences others.

Everything that we do. The letters that are written, so the seeds either of tares or of wheat, our thoughts, our words, the spirit in which we perform our duties all act their part in the formulation of character. Whatever we do has influence. That influence is being exerted around everybody around us and can it affect people's eternal destiny? That is a heavy ideal.

I will probably Well, there was a psychologist with interviewed by San Diego State University commenting on The influence of technology in young people's lives basically what she's saying is over the last 10 years We've seen depression rates double in young people So that is a interesting idea, Especially when you look at what they're looking at on all these different platforms. Largely the number 1 thing is comedy. Essentially what you realize is people are self-medicating. They're so depressed, they're trying to find a way to get out of that depression, and they turn to comedy to lift their spirits and self-medicate. Okay, let's see if I can quickly wrap this ideal up.

I think this verse is fascinating. I sometimes will take a different angle in situations like this. This is from Revelation 3.17. It's talking about the Laodicean Church, and I think it's a commentary on our times. Why do I say that?

It uses these 2 words, wretched and miserable. What does wretched mean? It means very unhappy. Do you know what miserable means? Well, I'll show you.

It means wretchedly unhappy. This group is unhappy on top of being unhappy. Do you know what that is? That's depression. And I sometimes wonder if this isn't also a commentary on our times.

And so fortunately we don't have to stay there. Jesus gives us, you know, what we need. He says, buy us gold tried in the fire, which is faith. He talks about the white garments, which is Christ's righteousness. He talks about the eye sap.

And I have a tendency to put those in reverse order when I'm putting this puzzle together. And Jesus is telling us, you need to see that you need righteousness by faith. And that's the solution to our problems today. We can't solve our own problems. We can't solve our own self-worth.

We can't solve any of that, but we can turn to Christ and let Him transform us. So I think I will wrap it up with these couple verses. Couple verses, the righteous should choose his friends carefully, for the way of the wicked leads them astray. And also, do not be deceived, evil company corrupts good habits. Awake to righteousness and do not sin, for some do not have the knowledge of God.

And then Paul ends with, I speak this to you, Shane. About AudioVerse, or if you

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