Two Minute Tuesday: How Social Media Took Over Our Lives
Chris Martin’s Terms of Service — The Real Cost of Social Media
In the age of TLDR and doom scrolling, Two Minute Tuesdays are short posts, random thoughts, and wonderings—something between a Substack note and an essay—meant to be read in roughly two minutes.
The subtitle of Chris Martin’s Terms of Service is “The Real Cost of Social Media.” We all know now there’s something dark about social media—that it’s doing something to us. I’ve seen several posts on Substack recently about how technology is not only stealing our attention and creativity, but is also affecting our spiritual formation. In Terms of Service, Chris Martin approaches the problem of social media and the attention economy from a Christian perspective.
The Inescapable Grip of the Social Internet
Chris Martin published the book in 2022. I’m writing this in 2025. It’s crazy to see how the impact of social media has increased in just three years. Think TikTok. According to Martin, the social internet has embedded itself into human culture. Martin says there’s no escaping it. People who delete their social media accounts still encounter its influence through news and conversations. It’s everywhere.
Designed for Addiction
Before diving into what social media is doing to us, Martin gives a brief history of the social internet, which I found fascinating. Martin writes, “Man made social media to serve man, but man has come to serve social media.” How did that happen?
Martin writes:
The social internet is designed with addiction in mind. The systems are designed to enslave our eyes. We’ve been set up. We’re being played.
Martin guides us through his personal experiences and the research today to clearly show how we are being experimented on in order to make billions for social media companies and advertisers. The most fascinating part is that designers and programmers admit this in their own words.
For example, Sean Parker the first president of Facebook stated in an interview with Axios:
It’s a social validation feedback loop…exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators—it’s me, it’s Mark Zuckerberg, it’s Kevin System on Instagram, it’a all of these people—understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.
The Experiment We Didn’t Agree To
You may say, “I never gave anyone permission to experiment on me. They can’t do that!” Ah, well that’s where the Terms of Service come in. You know, those pesky things no one reads when they download an app or sign up for a service? We’ve all agreed to be part of the experiment.
Martin digs into the effects of social media use, not just on an individual basis but on society as a whole. He looks at everything. How does social media affect teenagers by making them feel like they have to be constantly performing for their phones? How does it affect political polarization? How does it affect the spread of information and disinformation?
He writes:
In the early twentieth century, many scholars and philosophers, like media philosopher Marshall McLuhan who wrote the book The Medium Is the Massage, believed a technology would eventually come along that would establish a “global village,” connecting the whole world. That technology, the internet, did come along. But the internet hasn’t created a global village; it has provided an avenue for all the individual ideological villages of the world to fight with one another.
A Different Approach to Digital Well-Being
We long for meaning, affirmation, belonging, and joy, which can only be found in Jesus Christ. Sin leads us in all the wrong directions. Martin says, “We are often the worst versions of ourselves online.” Thankfully, he gives some suggestions on how we can protect ourselves and manage the social internet, rather than have it manage us. I was honestly surprised at his suggestions. They aren’t the usual “delete your accounts” or “lock your phone away.” He focuses more on building genuine friendships, pursing humility, valuing silence, and intentionally spending time outdoors admiring the beauty of creation. These things guide us to Christlikeness and truth, rather than pixels and likes.