Even Amish youth caught in selfie culture
The insidious power of social media and smartphones have infiltrated lives of Amish teens and young adults.
It says something about the insidious power of social media and smartphones that they have infiltrated even the lives of some Amish teens and young adults.
These are young people who were reared in a deeply religious community that works hard to keep much of the modern world, and its conveniences, at a distance.
Donald Kraybill, senior fellow emeritus at Elizabethtown College’s Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, told LNP that while some Amish church districts have strict rules against cellphones, others allow cellphones for business purposes.
According to King’s reporting, some young Amish women are using Instagram to promote the products they sell, even though that social media and e-commerce platform contrasts “greatly against the Amish community and its values of simplicity and frugality.”
“Selfies and self-promotion,” King noted, “also seem to clash with humility, another value of the Amish.”
Some Amish young people aren’t just using Instagram for marketing. That social media platform is popular with some Amish teens and young adults for sharing videos and photos — even selfies, King found.
That’s despite the Amish belief that posed photographs violate the biblical commandment, “Thou shalt not make unto thyself a graven image.”
The lure of the selfie, it seems, is strong. And more universal than we imagined. How have we gotten here? Most of us came of age well before selfies and social media were things. While we may take an occasional selfie, we find the constant sharing of oneself — the posing, the framing, the editing, the cropping out of reality — to be exhausting.
And we find it disheartening that some Amish teens — like their English (that is, nonAmish) counterparts — are embracing selfie culture.
The captions on Amish Instagram posts may include Bible verses. And the backdrops of Amish selfies may differ — picturesque and plowed Lancaster County fields, as opposed to bubble tea and coffee shops — but the aim seems to us to be the same: to depict life as shiny and bright.
There is little authenticity to be found on Instagram. It’s a curated version of our lives, not as they are, but how we want them to be seen.
Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar, senior lecturer at Sapir College in Israel, conducted a study of Old Order Amish and ultra-Orthodox women and their responses to cellphone and smartphone use. The Amish women in Shahar’s study considered smartphones to be “the most dangerous device” — even more so than radio or television.
We would agree. They’re perilously addictive for adults as well as teens.
Our smartphones have taken over our lives. Too often we are viewing important moments through the camera lenses on our phones, eager to capture them so we can post them. Instead of simply living them.
And those curated lives we share on social media? It’s hard not to compare them to the curated lives of others. This rarely leads to contentment.
One formerly Amish man, Steven Stoltzfus of Berks County, told LNP that social media “definitely makes it easier” for “uncertain, unsatisfied and struggling (Amish) individuals” to be tempted to leave their community behind and join the English.
Meanwhile, non-Amish parents also worry that social media will lead their kids to embrace values that differ from their own. That their kids will embrace the superficial instead of the substantive. That all that posing will replace authentic living.
“The Amish have been amazingly resilient,” Jantzi said. “But I just feel like the world of the internet is a power like nothing we’ve ever seen.”
“And can you really shut the door on that?”
He thinks “if anybody can do it, it’s the Amish.”
Given our own experience, we have our doubts.
The internet is an amazing resource, a portal to the universe. But once you’ve unlocked it with your smartphone, it’s hard not to be consumed by it.
We hold our smartphones, but their grip on us is tighter. The Amish will find this to be true soon enough.