I have a Facebook account. I don't do much with it, but I know people who do, perhaps even you. Facebook is not the only "social media" out there, and social media, in one form or another, are here to stay. But in what form? How important? These are just some of the key questions.
I find it interesting that in the course of a week, I run into two thoughtful takes on the impact of "the Facebook Era" on our spirituality. Both decided, curiously enough, to use, as an example of what they were trying to say, the impact of Facebook on how we handle...death.
One author, Lisa Miller, Newsweek columnist, has a somewhat negative take. She notes that when famous (I guess he was famous; before he died I had not noticed him) British fashion designer Alexander McQueen committed suicide, over 80,000 people that following week became "fans" of McQueen on Facebook, sending in prayers and condolences by the score. She noted some of the shorter messages ("Genius" "It's been 5 days, i actually miss you as tho i knew you -- sleep well") left onscreen and wrote: "This is how we collectively mourn: Globally. Together. Online."
Is this good or bad? To Lisa, it's both. "One might imagine such virtual mourning is shallow," she writes, "but it's not. Here is a real gathering place, where friends can grieve together -- and where the deceased continues, in some sense, to exist." "You're creating something like a tombstone, anytime, anyplace, as long as they have Internet access," opines Brian McLaren, a leader in the emerging church movement and author of A New Kind of Christianity. "That seems to be a great gain."
Now that we live far away from close friends and family, Lisa points out, we don't have at our fingertips the old country church method of mourning-and-yet-still-connecting with the dead. "The Christian ideal of 'the community of saints,'" says she, "in which the dead rest peacefully in the churchyard, as much a part of the congregation as those singing in the nave, is something any 19th-century churchgoer would have instinctively understood." She thinks Facebook can stand in for that absence of literal proximity with the "virtual" kind.
Still, she asks, "Something is gained, but what is lost in this evolution from corporeal [physically present] grief...to the grief tagged with a virtual rose?" She notes that grief is "a physical event...the loss of a physical body," not a virtual one.
Yet, in a recent (Feb. '10) edition of The Lutheran magazine, Clint Schnekloth presents a positive example of "communal Facebook grieving": after telling others on his page that he was going to his 93-year-old grandma's funeral and briefly eulogizing her there, Clint accidentally bumped into friends in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where the funeral was to be held. The friends, because of his Facebook page, already knew of his loss: "So sorry to hear about your grandma." By the time he got to his hotel room, his "page" was full of condolences from all over the nation. His point: "Facebook deepens rather than diminishes face-to-face relationships.
Clint goes on in this vein, and yet, off on a sidebar, shaded lavender, is another, shorter Facebook article by Andrew Lynch entitled, "Do's and Dont's: Say No to Facebook Excess." A couple of his don'ts: "Don't update every last thing you do," and "Don't get in the habit of obsessively checking Facebook. It can be a productivity killer." Here we get to the nub of the matter.
Building and keeping relationships healthy -- a key part of anyone's spiritual life as a servant of God and of one another -- takes two things: time and effort. And spending too much time on the computer/blackberry/iphone, etc. makes it difficult to find the amount of "face time" you need to keep your relationships properly fed and healthy. At one point the Apostle Paul (while in prison) tells the Philippian Christians, "indeed, you were concerned for me, but had no opportunity to show it." (Phil. 4:10) By subdividing our time between people by knowing more and more and more people on Facebook, we end up being able to spend little time with anyone.
Andrew noted that obsessively checking Facebook "can be a productivity killer." It can be, if mishandled, a relationship killer, too, since relationships very often rely on face-and-voice time -- time to touch, time to show the depth of your love and friendship for that other human being you're with through a hug or good deed -- and time for them to show the depth of their love for you. Love needs to be "embodied" to be as meaningful as it should be.
David Hewitt
