Friendship in a digital age
So, how many friends do you have? Well, that depends on what you mean by “friends.”
A recent Toyota ad features a teenager sitting with her friends. That is, she’s on Facebook alone in front of her computer. Older people, she laments, are “becoming more and more anti-social.” That’s why she pushed her parents into joining Facebook. But despite all her efforts, her parents only have 19 friends while she has 687 friends. “This is living,” she adds.
Meanwhile the ad cuts to mom and dad, who are mountain biking with other actual, live, humans. That is, they’re spending the day with their friends, while their daughter stares at Facebook.
In “Faux Friends,” an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, William Deresiewicz writes, “We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all.” Husbands and wives, parents and children, bosses and employees, pastors and church members, waiters and customers, politicians and voters are all “friends.” And now thanks to Facebook and other social networking websites, people who barely remember each other from junior high school are “friends,” too.
We’ve come a long way from David and Jonathan or Ruth and Naomi, two classic examples of friends in the Bible. Such friendships, with their emotional intensity, personal commitment, and sacrificial love, are rare today, even in marriage. They take time, effort, and a willingness to know and be known as you really are.
Facebook, as Deresiewicz argues, gives us the impression of friendship not the real thing. On Facebook all our friends are assembled in one place. “Except,” as he says, “of course, they’re not in the same place, or, rather, they’re not my friends. They’re simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.”
As one woman told him, “It’s like they’re all having a conversation. Except they’re not.”
On-line you can be whatever you want to be, carefully crafting your image. Or — even worse — you can indiscriminately broadcast all your inmost thoughts and feelings, things that are better kept for private conversations with … well, with your real friends.
Of course, the problems with friendship today are bigger than Facebook, MySpace, and other sites. Friendship was in trouble before they came along. They’ve just made the situation worse.
Deresiewicz correctly identifies the idea implicit in social networking, “that identity is reducible to information,” specifically our “consumer preferences.” And social networking is, for the most part, nothing more than sharing information. But data tell us little or nothing about another person’s character — the most important quality of a good friend. We only learn about that as we patiently share and hear one another’s stories.
“Posting information,” Deresiewicz writes, “is like pornography, a slick, impersonal exhibition.” Exchanging stories, he says, is mutual and intimate. It involves “probing, questioning . . . It takes patience, devotion, sensitivity, subtlety, skill,” all of which sharing stories teaches them.
While social-networking sites may have their place, Christian friendships, inspired by God’s love, have to go much deeper than digital chumminess. Indeed, we need to demonstrate the kind of relationship Jesus has with us when he calls each of us “friend.”via breakpoint.org
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I find it interesting when people who are in the older generation criticize (or at least raise questions) about what the younger generation is doing. I realize it's the normal pattern of youth culture from one generation to the next (the younger gen will do it about their kids, too), but when guys like Chuck Colson write authoritatively about social media and people who are two generations younger than them, I heed their words similarly to when Ken Ham talks about youth ministry. These are outside guys looking in and giving an opinion about something they don't understand. That's not always bad -- sometimes that kind of perspective is extremely helpful -- but if it's based on ignorance or "this isn't how it was when I was growing up" it rarely ends up being helpful. The telephone, instant messaging, email, etc, all came under the same criticism that Chuck is making here, except studies show that these forms of communication do not deter face-to-face relationships and communication. Instead, they're just an extension of it because, in my opinion, God created us with the innate need for human connection. Social media facilitates that in ways that the older generation doesn't understand.
Teenagers and "young professionals" value transparency and authenticity in ways that confuse the baby boomer generation. It used to be that you keep everything private and you put your best game-face on in public, but teenagers perceive that as being fake and want to share everything because it helps them feel like they're truly connecting with each other, the good, bad and the ugly. That feels threatening to baby boomers, but is very freeing for this generation.
Perhaps that is part of why teens are not as interested in church today: the baby boomers who are running churches today like to make everything look good and put on a natural front at church, but teens see through that and instead value messiness and transparency.
Oh Chuck... haha
