In a new book, The Church of Facebook: How the Hyperconnected Are Redefining Community, author Jesse Rice contends that social networking through technological media are having the effect of dis-embodying community and creating bad habits and trends for how we relate to one another.
"Our definition of community has shifted," he says. "Now it's a continuum, with 10 being your best friend and 1 being people you just sort of bump into online. But it's all community."
Facebook has its bashers, especially in Christian circles. While some believers say they find genuine community online, others insist that face-to-face interaction is essential to a life of faith. Some users find satisfaction in building and sharing their profiles, but others worry that Facebook breeds an all-about-me attitude and is eroding the capacity to listen and empathize.
But how true is this? As Putnam argues in Bowling Alone, our sense of community and our social and civic engagement with each other is not caused by or even correlated with "Facebook." This is an age old issue that is more linked with modern social differentiation than anything else. Says Rice,
"Online, we have power over how we express ourselves. You can take the time to choose your words carefully, edit your responses, PhotoShop a picture until you get it just right. Real conversations, real relationships don't allow that. They include awkward silences."
Rice has seen people give up on "embodied relationships" because they feel freer on Facebook. "People do argue that there's a richness to relationships online," he says. But it could be that they don't know what they're missing. "We don't feel that hunger anymore."
But let's look at the converse. Perhaps we have always felt that hunger, but it has been wanting in a consumer driven economy with what has been documented to be a case of often sever social differentiation. People these days have numerous social roles and social situations to manage and hold together. Robert Jay Lifton argues for this in The Protean Self, Robert Kegan in In Over Our Heads, and Kenneth Gergen in The Saturated Self – all written and published long before this "Web 2.0" phenomenon for which social networking is a critical component.
What I am suggesting is that we are at a crossroads of deeper social and psychic phenomenon for which social networking and Facebook-like applications seem to be doing two things: 1) actually filling a gap by giving people the means to connect where they would have been disconnected without it; 2) Helping people to manage and combine their various networks of relationality into something more holistic and seamless. If you pick up just about any economic or social-psychological study on happiness one common thread emerges – the strongest predictor of happiness is social connectedness.
Rice is sparing in his Christian references, lest he alienate non-Christian readers. But he uses the New Testament story of Jesus asking a Samaritan woman at the well for a drink of water. Rice says Jesus approaches the woman with "intentionality, humility and authenticity." Those qualities transform an ordinary encounter into a life-changing experience, he says.
I would be interested to see the evidence that social communities that emerge and develop through these technologies do not result in intentionality, humility, and authenticity. It could be that while they do not meet those needs fully, the outcome of social networking are those very sorts of things that keep us connected. Just last year I met and/or had phone conversations with over 30 people I would have not know existed except through media. While this might not be normative for everyone, we can for sure find enough examples where this is true.
This discussion ought to once again give us pause when we segment "real life" from "virtual life." What was once deemed virtual like a video game or a VR simulator is now weaved into the fabric of social connectedness that makes us human. Nonetheless, Rice's book seems like one to raise questions and hold valuable church discussions this year!
Rice also blogs at http://churchoffacebook.com/
via Author Worries Online Communities are Hurting Real Ones – News.
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I really like this idea of online community actually helping us to integrate all of our disconnected identities – really interesting. But do you think this could be a kind of easier substitute for the difficult work of integrating real life relationships.
For instance, we point friends from one context to our online identity so that they can see all the other parts of our lives that make up our identity – but this saves us from the scarier, more awkward task of trying to express and embody those different fragments through real world encounters and conversations?