My Bad about the Teddy Bear, Y’All

I have a mea culpa I need to get off my chest. These days the Companion lacks a good, official format for interaction between readers and the editorial staff, of which I am a part. People can send letters to the editor via email, of course—editors@covchurch.org—but they rarely do. I guess at some point we thought social media would take the place of email to provide a robust platform for reader engagement, but it never really did.

To explain why, I need to cite a tech writer named Cory Doctorow.

Writing in Wired magazine, Doctorow recently advanced a theory of how and why internet platforms rise and fall, using an analogy of a carnival worker who operates a rigged game. Hucksters allow a player to win a giant teddy bear early in the day, knowing that as that player walks around the fairgrounds, others will get the idea that they, too, can win a giant teddy bear. But they never do, because the rigged game will not allow that.

How naïve we were. We brought ourselves and our churches, schools, and organizations online hoping to bring positive transformation.

The teddy bear is an example of a premium value-add on internet platforms. At the beginning of a platform’s rise, the premium goes to the user. Internet companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon start by providing great value to the end user so their platforms will become popular and their user base will expand. Then the free teddy bear is taken away from the main user base and given to business users. So the free user experience is diminished, but brands and advertisers get great value in using the platform to reach their audience at minimal cost.

At some point, the platform’s leadership feels pressure to generate profitability, so the premium shifts to the shareholders. The platform pits users against advertisers as they extract value from each group to boost its own publicly traded share price. And since that makes the experience worse for both users and advertisers, user engagement plateaus, then craters. Eventually, the platform will die and something else will take its place.

Gen-X-ers like myself spent much of the last two decades trying to convince ourselves that social networking platforms would usher in a new era of internet-enabled democratized community engagement. I specifically remember thinking that Facebook would be better than other platforms and that people would have to behave themselves because their real names and photos were involved. Oh, how naïve we were.

We brought ourselves and our churches, schools, and organizations online hoping to bring positive transformation. As a creative person regularly generating faith-based articles, videos, and music, I thought we would be using the platform to spread our message further. Maybe in the beginning, that’s what happened.

But eventually, things switched. The platform used our message to spread itself further. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok don’t care about the ethical value of your content as much as they care about whether it will keep users engaged. It’s still possible to use the platform to uplift each other in the faith, but the effectiveness of any particular post, pic, or video is limited by the constraints of engagement algorithms that prioritize clickbait and manufactured controversies over substantive exchanges of ideas. The game is always rigged in favor of the platform.

To the millennials and Gen Zs taking the reins of Christian community discourse, my plea is that you learn from our mistakes. Think about what’s gained or lost when we shift from one form of media to another. Don’t forget the famous axiom of Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.”

As we continue to encounter new forms of technology, such as artificially intelligent tools and systems, let us not be ruled by fear, but be “alert and fully sober, [setting] your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed” (1 Peter 1:13). And if somebody offers you a free teddy bear, maybe just decline that offer.