Their Eyes Were Watching Screens

If you have been to college, you have probably studied Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. But in case you haven’t or your memories of your Philosophy 101 class are fuzzy, here is a recap: The Allegory is Socrates’ depiction of the effects of education on a soul. Picture a cave where people are chained to the wall, and all of their lives they have been facing another blank wall. In the center of the cave, behind the people, there is a fire. In between the fire and the people, objects are passing by, so the people live watching shadows of these images on the wall and they think they are so real, they give names to them.

They don’t know about the fire. They don’t know about the people parading the images. And they really don’t know that above them, there is an exit out of the cave that leads outdoors, into sunlight.

The person who is in the cave thinks that the images are reality. But when they are unchained – and Socrates holds that education of the soul has the power to break these chains – then they see the reality of the fire and the objects around it. If they move higher in their learning, they see the sunlight and are drawn towards it, for they see that this is truly reality.

I was thinking about this description of ‘enlightnment’ ever since our world has been transformed by our smart phones, and our eyes have constantly been watching images on screens. It’s a testament to the grasp Socrates (and his student, Plato, who recorded his thoughts) had on human nature that it is still a very relevant explanation for the distortions of reality we face. One only needs to think of a teen who is driven to suicide due to online bullying or the grandmother who succumbs to rampant dissatisfaction and depression based on the images, the false reality, gleaned from social media’s images of other peoples vacations or grandchildren.

Lately I have been reading a lot about the brain, and the allegory is also a fitting description of our minds. The cave is the unconcious mind and the sunlit outside is the freedom we have in the conscious mind. We are in prison by our subconscious mind due to the beliefs and habits it holds onto, and these can very much feel like chains and shadows. Social media and the images it feeds to our unconsciousness keeps us locked up to the degree that we have wounds and limiting beliefs in our unconscious mind. When we are set free and can move beliefs from the unconscious to the conscious mind, the chains are broken, the truth of the reality of our wholeness is revealed, and we are set free.

How then are we supposed to use our technology, if it so easily generates shadows for us that clearly trigger thoughts and feelings from our subconscious mind that are hanging out in our basements like boogey men? I think about my 14-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter who have just started out with their own smartphones, and all the other children who are being handed these rectangles, not knowing that with out the proper education, they will become shackles for them?

The key word in this whole allegory is education. Plato believed in the correct formation of a soul, so taking into account the whole of our lives and habits helps us see the ones that are good for us and the ones that aren’t. Learning about makeup, cooking, and gardening on social media? All good things. But constantly being bombarded by images and voices when we haven’t already filled our souls with strong foundations of truth and beauty can mess with even the strongest social media user.

During my own social media fast I have found that my education has shifted from mindlessly scrolling to reading more books, diving deep into particular works of writers and thinkers. It has been really wonderful to sit with one voice for a period of time, to digest it, to get to know it, and to inform my thoughts in a meaningful way instead of stay in my mind for a fleeting moment, only to be driven out by the next stream of ideas and voices. I have so much respect for people finding their voices on social media, but the thing I personally struggle with is I can’t hear anything amid the sheer volume of them. And I know it really stunts me from sharing writing there because I don’t want to add to the noise. I want to be reflective, and then share. And to do that I need to study.

I also really struggle with the weaknesses of our brains that get exploited by social media. After watching The Social Dilemma which details this exploitation, it is hard to un-know how these weaknesses operate, and that everyone is being primed to be a consumer, to give over their most precious commodity – their attention. In Phenomenology, a recent modern branch of philosophy (which Pope John Paul the Great wrote his dissertation on) our attention goes by the name of intentionality. It is the core of our experience of living as conscious beings. It is the root of mindfulness, of meditation, of prayer. If we are giving all of that up to the hands of an algorithm, what does that mean for our experience of being alive?

For me, one of the most troubling parts of consuming social media has been having this distrust of what I am consuming. I am constantly asking, is the person creating this content looking for attention? Genuinely trying to share goodness and truth? Trying to sell me something? There is a lot of goodness, joy, community and humor to be found on social media. But the ways in which real life filters me from judging people – even just connecting to their basic 3-D humanity – are sometimes stripped from me on a two dimensional screen. This is why we see so much online vitriol. People forget that the other person is a daughter, sister, friend because of the apparatus they are using to connect.

On social media, there have also been many people who I start out enjoying, but when they start to post every single day about intense experiences and insights, they get watered down because of the platform I am consuming them on. Their thoughts look less like pearls of wisdom and more like shadows meant to manipulate my feelings and pull my attention by their confessional quality. I start to fatigue of the intensity of knowing their thoughts so up close, especially when they are louder and more frequent than those of my husband or my sister or my best friend. Without even being fully conscious of it happening, because it happens lightening fast, social media makes me judge others poorly at times. Not always, but the few times it does makes me happy to be taking a break.

Right after I wrote the first draft of this post I read this article on the Paradox of Abundance (which I found via Mama Needs Coffee blog). It arrives at these same conclusions about the abundance of information. Much like food, people are realizing that they need to think about what they are consuming if they want to be better, and they need to be consuming less. With so much abundance, more people are consuming more while a few elite are forgoing the surplus, using discipline and getting fitter/smarter. The idea of being free from the information overload sounds very appealing.

It all makes me glad to be avoiding social media and whittling away at my book stack on my nightstand/Kindle/Audible. It makes me want to stick to listening to voices that spend time in reflection instead of posting every day to please algorithms. If they have lasted the test of time, even better. And I know I am not alone. In fact I think people are on their phones hungry for something, and they want to know the truth about reality. Our eyes are watching screens because we are craving light, we just need to make sure we remind ourselves that all we need to do to find it is step outside.