The topic of constant media saturation came up and he commented:

“I think if we remeber that Kierkegaard’s obsession with individuation and responsibility is about finding genuine faith, vis a vis the false individuation offered by normalising social institutions such as the state Church, then I think his relentless deconstruction of a false individuality is something might be helpful in our society of ‘individuals.’ His repudiation of aesthetics–understood in its pre mock-Hegelian sublation into religion as flight from boredom–is also pertinent in a society of smartphones and streaming media”

Being a complete novice and needing to read his thoughts with a thesaurus on hand, I asked:

“I really resonate with his obsession with authenticity. I think it could speak greatly to the ways we often live in the west. It’s a challenge to church people to examine their lives in a way that is much less abstract than is so often the case in churches.

You mention false individuality; would you agree that in our current society, the smart phone and constant media streaming in many ways serves as another normalising institution? So whilst we may be much more alone and have the appearance of making our own decisions, we are actually not making individual choices at all, rather selections from a set of socially curated options set before us?”

What we ended up agreeing was that social media/constant media saturation, “as a part of a whole world-system, obscures or perverts important aspects of reality such that we are drawn to live within a set of false boundaries, and become blind to our blindness.”

I think this addition to what you are saying – not only are our attention spans shorter and our paradigms so much more tightly constrained, but it strips us of any authenticity and makes us so completely consumed in groupthink that we can’t even see the contradictions and myopia in what we engage with. We talk about “conversations” but are almost completely unable to have an actual authentic conversation.