Glorious things of thee are tweeted
I’ve never read Augustine’s City of God cover to cover. So I joined a Twitter experiment to help me get through it.
My husband thinks I spend too much time on social media, and most likely he’s right. But as I surface for a moment from the great swirling ocean of online chatter, I have some thoughts about how the experience can be redeemed.
Aside from relatively harmless time-wasting diversions—popular videos of adorable children, prodigies, and pets—the key thing is to avoid the ubiquitous comment threads in which Person 1 posts an opinion, Person 2 chimes in with agreement or dissent, Person 3 adds a correction or intensification, and before long a troll catches the scent and swoops in for the kill. While informed participation in public life is a moral good, mere opinion-mongering is a deadly snare.
Possibly the Buddha had the Internet in mind when he cautioned his disciple Vacchagotta not to get caught up in the disputes of the day, as they amount to “a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a writhing of views, a fetter of views,” generating “suffering, distress, despair, and fever” rather than the “calm, direct knowledge” that leads to awakening.
