Skip to main content

Depravity at Instagram

Bianca Bosker's Huffington Post article on the social network app Instagram provides yet more evidence  of man's inherent capacity to corrode the good gifts of life. Instagram, the photo-sharing app, is technologically morally neutral. Indeed at its best it should not only deliver “fast" and "beautiful” ways to exchange images but should be an active conduit for positive innovation and creativity.  But the app once heralded as the "Eden of social networking sites" is now threatened with the dark nature of its users:
It’s the place where 80 million people share picturesque, gently-tinted photos of bouquets, sunsets, spaghetti and cappuccinos. And it’s a service Facebook paid $1 billion to bring into its fold. But beyond the food porn that regularly tops Instagram’s “most popular” list lurks an abundance of, well, porn porn. Images tagged with terms such as “sextagram,” “instaporn,” and “handbra” summon up tens of thousands of images of genitalia and nude — or nearly naked — men and women posing provocatively in beds, in bathrooms, or with a partner in a similar state of undress….Instagram is being used not only as a way to exchange X-rated images, but also a place for sex chat partners to find each other, offering a glimpse at how cybersex has adapted to the social media age. Via photos, comments and hashtags, many Instagram members are inviting other users to join them for “KikSex” on the messaging app Kik, where individuals can chat privately or exchange nude photos. 
This shouldn't surprise us because every new social network has been accompanied by such developments. The more users the larger the sample becomes representative of the average person. As Terri Senft, a professor specializing in global media at New York University’s Department of Liberal Studies observes : “If something bills itself as non-pornographic then becomes that way, to me it’s a sign that it’s reached the public knowledge-base, and now it’s solidly there.” The reason is that man is totally depraved and therefore everything he touches no matter how good becomes corrupt.  Indeed, it is even much bleaker because the Bible tell us that man has a tendency not only to corrupt everything he touches, but to actively seek new ways of corrupting things. As new technologies are invented, others are actively working to find ways of how to use those technologies to multiply sin. We are by nature workers of iniquity. St Paul writing to the church in Rome describes man’s sinful posture as follows :
Since they thought it foolish to acknowledge God, he abandoned them to their foolish thinking and let them do things that should never be done. Their lives became full of every kind of wickedness, sin, greed, hate, envy, murder, quarrelling, deception, malicious behaviour, and gossip. They are backstabbers, haters of God, insolent, proud, and boastful. They invent new ways of sinning, and they disobey their parents”. [Romans 1:28-30, NLT]
Once again we find that what the media pundits and social experts of this age try and understand, God has already made it plainly clearly in the Bible. It is therefore to God we must look for an answer. Technological filters wont do. Hopes of creating an Eden on earth by our own hands, whether on line or in  the real world are delusions of grandeur. It is only God himself who is able to change our hearts so that we are no longer drawn to a life that endlessly seeks to invent new ways of sinning. Only he can draw us to a life that seeks to live in a way that honours Him and builds a better world.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I am what I am by Gloria Gaynor

Beverly Knight closed the opening ceremony of the Paralympics with what has been dubbed the signature tune of the Paralympics. I had no idea Ms Knight is still in the singing business. And clearly going by the raving reviews she will continue to be around. One media source says her performance was so electric that "there wasn’t a dry eye to be seen as she sang the lyrics to the song and people even watching at home felt the passion in her words" . The song was Gloria Gaynor's I am what I am . Clearly not written by Gloria Gaynor but certainly musically owned and popularized by her. It opens triumphantly: I am what I am / I am my own special creation / So come take a look / Give me the hook or the ovation / It's my world that I want to have a little pride in / My world and it's not a place I have to hide in / Life's not worth a damn till you can say I am what I am The words “I am what I am” echo over ten times in the song. A bold declaration that she ...

The Humility of Newton

Thou hast honoured me. Thou hast given me a tongue and a pen, many friends; (Thou] hast made me extensively known among thy people and I have reason to hope, useful to many by my preaching and writings... It is of thine own that I can serve thee. And if others speak well of me, I have no cause to speak or think well of myself. They see only my outward walk; to thee I appear as I am. In thy sight I am a poor, unworthy, unfaithful inconsistent creature. And I may well wonder that Thou hast not long ago taken thy word utterly out of my mouth and forbidden me to make mention of thy Name any more! JOHN NEWTON ( Source : Wise Counsel) Newton wrote these words addressed to God in his diary in 1789. In that year, Newton’s fame had grown significantly because of his publishing ‘ Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade’ and his appearance before Her Majesty’s Privy Council appointed to investigate the slave trade.  I find Newton’s words quite challenging. The words reveal a heart truly sh...

Incarnation and Modernity

[The Bible] resituate modernity's prejudices within a wider context from which they were originally wrenched, showing them to be reductive heresies of a more complex biblical reality. So whereas modernity privileges an unchanging a-historicity, in the incarnation God enters history at a particular moment to gather a people to be with him not in a Greck eternity of unchanging timelessness, but in a biblical eternity of never-ending and ever-renewed intimacy and relational richness. Whereas modernity subordinates the particular to the universal, the Bible perfectly marries the universal "image of the invisible God" together with a particular first-century Palestinian Jewish man. Whereas modernity seeks the abstract over the material and finds itself painfully akimbo between the twin idols of materialism and immaterialism, in the same gesture the incarnate Christ validates material reality and prevents his followers from ever worshipping it. Finally, whereas modernity secks ...