Social Media Lessons from the Amish

Pre-Amble

Quick Update: For those that don’t already know I recently started the Masters in Media and Strategic Communications (MMSC) program at Calvin University. I hope to have a more substantial update post eventually. In the meantime here are a few thoughts about social media and digital overwhelm.

An examination of Ashlee Humphreys’ Social Media: Enduring Principles and the Amish, Mennonite, and Hutterite communities.

Key Question: Is the Amish community a social media platform?

Community vs Communication?

“New media often helps us see old media in a new light.” - Ashlee Humphreys (16)

On a recent trip to an area of Indiana called Shipshewana, I got to visit their Amish, Menonite, and Hutterite cultural center - Menno-Hof. While I was touring Menno-Hof, I was struck by a concept proposed by one of the displays: community vs communication. The presentation sought to explain where and how Amish, Mennonite, and Hutterite groups draw the lines between their communities and the needs and methods of communicating with the rest of the world.

In our modern world we are often faced with choices that push us toward more communication, but not always towards more community. This has become a common theme among critics of social media (here I mean digital communication). The more we “connect” with others online, the less we seem to actually feel a connection to them (Humphreys, 7).

Structuration Against Digital Overwhelm

Perhaps knowingly or not, the Amish way of life combats the digital overwhelm faced by many young professionals and digital social media users on platforms like Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok. Humphreys calls this the communal structuration, “the interactions of individuals...structured by constraints in communications technologies, legal structures, and social norms” (13).

For the Amish structuration includes limits around many items that might clutter the home from wall hangings to floor coverings. More public displays of constraints on Amish life include: wearing plain clothes, not taking pictures of themselves, and the use of horse and buggies in place of cars. Most distinctly, in a world of digital natives, they are prohibited from having many of the technologies associated with connection in life today - such as radios, televisions, phones and computers - within their homes.

However I’m not sure anyone can eliminate overwhelm as part of the human experience. Nor am I convinced that these communities are not in and of themselves social media platforms within which members engage in a form of social media. As Humphreys reminds us “social media is not dependent on digital communication” (7).

Amish Lifestyle as Overwhelmed Social Media

The very act of choosing to live the Amish lifestyle is a collaborative act intended to communicate, and thus a form of speech (See notes 1 and 2). In places like Shipshewana Amish life has created a thriving tourist industry, evidence that “People act within a given structure to achieve their own ends” (Humphreys, 13). The community produces a lot of “user generated content” in the form of gifts, furniture, food, and experiences. Our tour guide to a local farm mentioned “we’ve got a lot more money today then we used to,” somewhat antithetical to the historical context of the Amish as landless anabaptists forbidden to appoint their children as heirs.

One of the key concepts that the Amish struggle with today is how to continue advocating for their way of life. Their lives today continually place them in the position of “always performing and always spectating” (Mattson, Chapter 5), as the very private decision of following distinct Christian beliefs becomes a very public display for others. In turn this can create an overwhelm and uncertainty through “speech fright” “about what role any given person is playing at any given moment” (Mattson, Chapter 5). The narcissistic self tells us: Who we are is who others see us as. Driving back towards what Craig Mattson calls the key question of advocacy: “...how might communicators practicing advocacy help produce the mutuality that we long for and that our communities need?”

In response, Humphreys reminds us that “the interaction between media and human beings gives culture its character” (17). I think what we should take away from the Amish, Mennonite, and Hutterite communities is a healthy respect for the limits of our reach. It is precisely these limits that help us establish and build communities. Though it is equally important to remember that there are others outside our communities whom we should connect with, help, and not fight. (Notes 3 and 4)

In the digital world, building community is no easy feat.

Notes

• Note #1: The intent to communicate, definition of speech, is used in first amendment law to determine if an action such as taking a knee during the national anthem is considered speech. You can explore more of the things I’m learning in COMM 512 in this podcast.

• Note #2: Humphreys’ definition of social media is “a set of practices for communicating, usually collaboratively, and usually so that it is visible to more than one person” (7).

• Note #3: One of the reasons the Amish have stuck with the buggy over the use of cars is that it keeps people closer to home and limits the reach of their travel.

• Note #4: Some of the distinctive features of the Amish and Menonite communities are their religious duty to help those in need and a prohibition against taking up arms against others.

“True evangelical faith cannot lie dormant. It clothes the naked, it feeds the hungry, it comforts the sorrowful, it shelters the destitute, it serves those that harm it, it binds up that which is wounded - it has become all things to all creatures.” — Menno Simons

Explore Digital Overwhelm Further

• My professor Craig Mattson runs a substack devoted to the concept of Digital Overwhelm and Young Professionals.

• I recently found this podcast episode with Pulitzer Prize winning Investigative Data Journalist, Mar Cabra that looks promising.