Woman in long sleeve ankle length body-con dress —Quranic reminders —Family photos of a friend you’ve never met —motivational quote —Islamic event this Saturday! If Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, thought TV was bizarre —“We’ll be back with a quick look a molestation,” a quote he pulled from a Daytime talk show in which he noted —how can one take a quick look at molestation? I’d imagine he’d think of social media as a circus on steroids. If a daytime talk show of the 90s was to give a ‘quick look’ at a deeply serious topic, social media gives a passing glance —at best.
And yet none of this would actually be an issue; the quick look or passing glance, if we weren’t trying to stuff so much into either media. The medium is the message, a quote I first heard from Postman and later listened to a deeper explanation from the source himself, Marshall McLuhan. In short, the fact that you use a particular medium is more important than any content one could hope to include in it. What comes to mind for me as a quick metaphor is binging. If one binges on cookies, cakes, ice cream, chips, soda, cheeseburger, milkshake, and fries —how much will it matter if you throw in carrots and celery? Probably not much.
There’s an idea, or at least there was last I was on Twitter, that more scholars should join social media and “teach” on the medium. But now that I’ve been off of most social media I’ve contemplated the idea of scholars, religious people, and the like not being on social media at all. If religious people are not on Twitter, Twitter becomes a place where only irreligious people go. No longer can we make the excuse that we’re just on the medium to follow ‘so and so’ for Islamic reminders.
Take a bar for example —a metaphor I’ve used previously. We don’t go to bars because they are *known* as places that sell alcohol. That is their reputation. Although they also sell water, soda, snacks. No Muslim would —if they cared even slightly about their moral standing with God and the Muslim community, find themselves there. But, if suddenly scholars began to go there to have a drink of water or even hold classes the average Muslim would have little fault in following suit.
Is social media like a bar? It’s hard to say, whereas with a bar no matter where you go, the smell of alcohol will likely surround you it is at least possible to create somewhat of a bubble on social media —hence the idea of a “Muslim Twitter”. Nevertheless, like getting water at a bar one is a great deal less likely to remain untouched the more they engage. The “best among us” —at least some of them, should remain untainted. Unbothered and untouched by the latest social media rousing —the foam atop the sea that is sure to wash away.
We need them to be the sea, to look beyond the passing discourse of the day and give us more meaning. The kind of meaning found in the dusty books on library shelves and the wisdom of sages. And to reach this sea must necessarily require effort from us. The mindset of the average scroller when they reach an Islamic reminder in between an inappropriately dressed woman and fluff motivational quotes is vastly different and incomparable to the one who travels to the shores and seeks to be cleansed by the sea.
Photo by Luís Eusébio on Unsplash
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