Jesus said in Luke 7:31-32:
“To what then shall I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another,
“‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we sang a dirge, and you did not weep.’
Jared Wilson comments with this:
When someone in our culture is having a rough time, they tell us online. When they are serving others, they tell us online. And when they are serving others despite having a rough time, they tell us online. There is almost no thought, feeling, inclination, impulse, or attitude we don’t share with everyone who will listen.
On the one hand, such transparency can be very valuable. It certainly is more honest than holding everything in or acting like we’re fine when we’re not. On the other hand, though, there is a fine line between transparency and vanity. Authenticity is great. Except when it’s not.
I think my generation has spun the older Me Generation into a sort of “Look at Me” Generation, and now of course the generations after Gen-X are progressively perfecting “Look at me!” into a science. Or an art. I’m not sure why we seem constantly puzzled that someone like Paris Hilton or Spencer and Heidi can be famous for doing nothing when nearly everyone these days thinks everything they do is something, something worthy of comment or props or Likes.
His point is not that we should stop blogging, facebooking, and tweeting. It’s that we should examine our motives for doing so.
Are you posting status updates to call attention to yourself, or are you doing it in order to “proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9)?