I started facebooking a while ago after my wife started facebooking. She started it after a stay with her mothers in which a friend of hers helped her set it up. I started so I could answer questions for my wife as I learn best by doing.
I have 62 friends which is a pawltry amount compared to most people I know and probably most people on facebook. Of those 62 only 27 of them I have seen in the last year. If I break it down to those I have had a significant conversation with face to face it drops to even fewer.
If I remove family and the cat the number of facebook "friends" I have drops to 48. If I remove friends that I am friends with because they are my children's friends that number drops to 25.
I used to have more friends but a couple of years ago I un-friended a great deal of them in an experiment to see who would notice. Only a couple sent new friend requests.
So is their a point to my ramblings? Yes. It is my hypothesis that facebook is actually a curse that we perceive as wonderful marvel of modern technology. If it gives us a false sense of importance and popularity by letting us post the most mundane events of our lives and then seeing what kind of feedback we get on them. If people "like" our status or make a comment then it boosts our self esteem because some one cares that we are bored, or the temperature is 60 degrees.
We can look at our friend count and say wow look at all the friends we have. Or we are deeply crushed by what some person we hardly know writes about us or posts on our wall.
Facebook gives us the allusion that we matter, that we are connected to others while in reality it disconnects us from one another. Let's be honest I have 62 "friends" on facebook. But the majority of these people would never invite me over for supper, or to go out to a movie or have a cup of coffee or to a party they are having, a good bulk of them would be horrified if I showed up at some event they where having. My children's friends for example.
Am I advocating that we boycott facebook, that everyone should delete their accounts? No, I just think we should approach it more realistically and realize that while it is a fun time waster that it is not really a "social" network. There's a reason that God came down to earth in the human form of His Son Jesus. Because we are physical relational creatures. For us to truly flourish we need "real" friends that are physically present with us in addition or even instead of the "digital" friends that we have through "social" networking sites such as facebook.
My biggest fear is that we are allowing this technology to have too large of an impact in our life. I can't help but wonder if the young teens who have taken their lives; because of the spiteful, hurtful things that were posted on facebook about them; would have had some "real" friends in the flesh they would have been able to shrug off what some insecure, narcissistic, people wrote about them.
In the end I think facebook allows us to equate popularity with friendship, and self worth and I believe that to be the dangerous seduction that we should be wary of.
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From the other point of view, many digital technologies, including facebook, reanimate and reelevate the written word. It used to be that people had friends that they wrote letters to constantly, and would write several letters a day. Then we would do everything by phone. Now we are back to writing again.
ReplyDeleteI think you make a valid point. However, I will disagree by saying 420 characters does not make a letter. Perhaps a running conversation and occasionally one with some substance. But I still think the seduction of a false sense of connectedness is very real.
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