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I Have Changed My Mind On Something and I Think You Should Too

So I've come to accept an opposing view on something pretty big. No, it won't make me a heretic. It centers around social media. It's new, it must be evil seems to be the mantra for many who have lived long enough to remember life before Al Gore made the internet. Okay, maybe that's not fair. Perhaps we should say that sensationalist media has led many to believe that social media has way too many temptations to appreciate the good that can come from it. 

 But now I'm wondering if we're not attacking an entity (the internet) but a generation and how they relate. As this article I'm about to link to points out, social media is the social equivalent of yesteryear's malls. This is where teens are. Good things happen. Bad things happen. Kind of like when we were all teens.  

 My new hero Tyler Smither said it well. I'll get it started here and you can click below to finish this article. It's worth the read. 
by Tyler Smither
Every few weeks, it seems, there is an article that makes the rounds among the youth ministry circles of the interwebs. These articles all tend to say the same thing: social media technology, specifically the apps on teenagers’ phones, is dangerous and is being used by our students in very unhealthy ways. This social technology is evil and it must be shunned!
For the many folks who are looking to teenagers to provide some sociological evidence of the fall, this line of thinking simply isn’t true. Sure, there are instances in which some teens misuse their social media apps; you may have even witnessed this in your own ministry setting. However, the vast majority of teens are not using social technology in this way. To assume that they are is missing the much bigger picture, and is actually doing a lot of harm to our witness as the Body of Christ.
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