Facebook... (long but a good read)

The cautionary view about Facebook hasn’t been sufficiently heard today. I’m neither against friendship nor the many ways tech­nology helps make life easier today. We can agree that Facebook has many advantages: it’s a handy self-updating address book, it reunites us with long-lost old friends, it’s a lifeline for missionaries and missionary kids whose friends are spread all over the world, it’s a great community photo album, and so on. I can see how many today find Facebook so helpful they can no longer imagine life without it.

But the truth is that before as little as seven years ago, before the 600 million users, when some of you were age 11-12 tweens, no one could imagine life with Facebook, because it hadn’t been invented yet. And amazingly, people back in those pre-fb Dark Ages were living happy, fulfilled lives. Though it may be hard to believe, they even communicated with their friends.

Here are a dozen reasons to be concerned about Facebook:

1. The Unfriend: Facebook has inflated the definition of friendship and thus devalued it. A friend used to be solid currency you could bank on. In the world of Facebook, friend has come to mean casual acquaintance. In this sense Facebook could only have been dreamt up in America, this land of the instant smile and handshake. I have learned that if you have just five genuine friends you are most fortunate, because you know that they will be friends for life. On Facebook, you might have 500 “friends” and not one true friend. You can friend or unfriend at a click. (Un­friend was Oxford Dictionary’s 2009 Word of the Year.) Worse yet, you can be unfriended without even so much as a “Dear John.” One stroke of the index finger and you’re zapped off the board. The casual fluidity of such things is distressing: it’s a brave new world of instant neural coupling and uncoupling, all from the safety of distance. Face­book has downgraded the meaning of friend­ship, and its ranking system of “inner” and “outer” circles has needlessly provoked envy and hurt. The Bible’s definition is stronger: “A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.” (Prov. 17:17). Friendship used to be defined by quality; now it seems more a matter of quantity. In the old pre-Facebook world, the important thing about friendship was goodness; today, its how many you amass. Oh, you only have 40? I have 200!



2. Virtual Reality: Facebook communica­tions remove us from reality. These transac­tions happen in the shadowy no-place of “vir­tual reality.” We have the comforting illusion that we’re interacting with people person-to-person, but it’s really our image that’s inter­acting with their image. We’re hunched over a screen in the privacy of our rooms. We proj­ect an image of ourselves, and we interface with the images others project of themselves. This can lead to less than truthful interaction: we’re all masters of putting our best foot forward. It can also foster the kind of subtle, dangerous Gnosticism that confus­es the immaterial image for real presence. Vir­tual technologies magically morph the mate­rial into the immaterial: “Facebook” is not a book; its “faces” are flattened representa­tions; its “pages” are not pages; its “walls” are as thin and bright as the screen. The spell is potent: we learn to look at the insubstantial figures of speech as if they are the things. A steady diet of these pictures of reality may dull our receptors and appetite for reality itself. Crav­ing the constant excitement of the virtual im­age, we might find the more subtle pleasures of our real surroundings boring compared to the greater stimulation of the screen.

3. Superficial Immediacy: Facebook in­teractions tend to be hasty and superficial. The medium by its own admission encour­ages only the most surface-level comments. We respond to the rapid fire of queries with off-the-cuff, knee-jerk blurting, not carefully thought-through responses or the discretion of not responding at all. Needless to say, this encourages neither the discipline of careful reading nor good writing, and “In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin: but he that refraineth his lips is wise.” (Prov. 10:19). Facebook demands 24/7 sound bites, but a stream of disjointed soundbites does not make an intelligent conversation. Actually, the word soundbites is misleading. More and more, we do all this “talking” without saying a word. We hold what we consider “conversa­tions” with people in total silence. A USA To­day article last month called 2010 “The Year We Stopped Talking to Each Other” (Jan. 30, 2010). It was about that weird paradox of so­cial networking: that the incessant chatter­ing of rapidly-moving fingers has made the world an eerily silent place.

4. Alone Together: Facebook perpetuates another social/anti-social oxymoron. Has it ever seemed strange to you that people in the same room connect with others far away but not with those in their immediate social space? Ap­parently, this no longer strikes many as odd. But next time you’re in a restaurant or airport terminal, unplug and observe. People no lon­ger talk to each other. They’re mesmerized by some piece of communication technology they hold in their hand—laptop, droid phone, etc. They might as well be hermetically sealed in their own bubbles; it’s as if the people around them don’t exist. What’s especially tragic is to see families in restaurants all tun­neling into their own hand-held devices. Haven’t we lost something important and very human here?

5. Low-Touch: So much of human com­munication lies in the bond between language and body. Think about the volumes that can be conveyed by a piercing glance, a tear, a smile, a hand on the shoul­der, a hug? Friendly sarcasm or a tough word of confrontation can be tempered in per­son—the surgeon’s scalpel that cuts in order to heal—but these words can be blunt meat cleavers over Facebook. The ministry of bear­ing burdens, holding one’s tongue and listen­ing, confession and forgiveness—all of these things involve real presence. If a friend is dying of cancer, you can shoot the family a text that says, “praying 4 u!” Or you can jump into your car, drive to the hospital room, and hold your dying friend’s hand at the bedside. You can hug the family members and cry with them. You can read them Scripture and sing hymns. In the 1980s, phone giant AT&T encouraged people to “reach out and touch someone.” And clearly, a personal phone call from a friend can be a touching thing. But whether by phone or Facebook, touch is still a metaphor. You can only really reach out and touch someone by being there. Our society is high-tech but low-touch, and growing more so every day. Jesus mixed his spit with mud and touched people. The society Jesus and our grandparents lived in was lower-tech but higher-touch. Obviously, there’s no go­ing back now, but it’s good to be aware of this important shift. And wherever we can, we should show up with the treasure in our real, tangible jar of clay.



6. Voyeurism: Nobody likes to think of himself as a “peeping Tom,” but the endless curiosity of flitting in and out of the minutiae of others’ lives can pose a dangerous temp­tation to vicarious living. Facebook makes it possible to eavesdrop anonymously on con­versations that have nothing to do with us. We can put our eye to the keyhole and no­body needs to know we’re looking. This used to be known as voyeurism. Today everyone can be Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window just by staring into a screen. With 300 friends, we have a rear window into 300 personal worlds. But is this good? For one, the temptation to indulge in idle curiosity rises exponentially. Someone has called the world we’re mov­ing into the “peek-a-boo” world. It’s time we came to grips with the great danger of false intimacy Facebook makes possible. It’s an odd paradox that people are often comfort­able sharing things on Facebook they would never say face to face. They air their deepest secrets on this most impersonal, public me­dium, and yet are incredibly awkward and guarded in person. This is how people link up with high school sweethearts, first virtu­ally and then in reality: no strings attached. Countless marriages have been ruined by this. There’s such a thing as internet por­nography; there’s also the subtler emotional infidelity of false intimacy. Christians have largely focused on the former; it’s high time we talked about the latter. Harold Sightler and many other men of God early in their ministry set a personal policy of never talking to women other than their wife behind closed doors. But how can we “keep the doors open” on Facebook?

7. Narcissism: Corresponding to voyeur­ism in our peek-a-boo world is the lure of exhibitionism. We’re so tempted today to make our lives the central story, to turn our biography into the stuff of fiction. It’s the self-promotional pop-art world where everyone seeks his 15 minutes of YouTube fame. Author C. S. Lewis said that humil­ity doesn’t mean thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less. But with the constant demand for personal updates, Facebook fos­ters a culture of narcissism, where we come to believe the harmful delusion that the world revolves around us. We think of ourselves all the time, because we have to keep up with the Joneses. If we don’t update, people may think we’re anti-social. Horrors, they may unfriend us! But how much do we tell? Does the world really need to know what flavor of pizza we ate last night?

8. Endless Distraction: The tyranny the trivial increasingly exercises over our lives is perpetuated by the incessant Facebook update. We’re rapidly becoming a society of drone bees flitting restlessly from flower to flower. We can never pause, because there’s always more nectar to gather somewhere else. We’ve learned to live with a constant low-grade chatter of information. In this world of instant gratification, we demand to know everything—now! It’s easy to lose our bear­ings in the flood of irrelevance that swamps our lives. Nicholas Carr, in his recent The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2010), says that our brains have be­come “juggler’s brains.” Like the Cat in the Hat, we have to keep so many things in the air at the same time. There’s no time to stop and rest, no time to think, no time to spread deep roots and watch seeds grow. All of this demands patience, an endangered virtue in our culture. Blaise Pascal in Pensées recog­nized this as man’s insatiable appetite for di­versions. Pascal says we run after diversions because we want to escape the weighty reali­ties of life and death. And how many of these endlessly diverting rabbit trails are motivated by our sinful craving for the latest gossip? In Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Montag’s wife Mildred is per­fectly content to spend her days sitting in the comfort of her living room, endlessly enter­tained by the chattering projections of her “friends” on enormous wall screens, while all of the books of the world go up in flames. Here’s what’s chilling: we’ve gotten there in less than fifty years. This is our world. You and I are Mildred.

9. The Tyranny of the New: Facebook traps us in the present-tense company of our peers. As a culture, we’ve largely cut ourselves off from the wisdom to be learned from past generations. And we’ve done this voluntarily. Tradition, G. K. Chesterton wisely said, is “the democracy of the dead.” By trading the great books of the past for the constant pres­ent-tense of Facebook, we’ve deprived the dead of their voices. Reading old books takes slow, uninterrupted time, as any reader of the Word of God can attest. We’ve exchanged the wisdom of our elders for the opinions of our contemporaries, not realizing how uncomfortably stale the air in our little jar has become. In his little book Why Johnny Can’t Preach (2009), T. David Gordon argues that pastors today can no lon­ger preach a good exegetical sermon because they’ve been shaped by a pop-diet of Face­book and YouTube, not deep patient reading.

10. Lost Time: It’s the cruelest of ironies that our time-saving devices gobble up all our time. As everything gets faster, we tell our­selves we’re wise stewards of time but deep down we know we’ve become time’s slave. A wise man said, “We can make a lot of things today, but we can’t make time.” The older I get, the more I see that time is precious currency that flows away faster and faster with every year. “Only one life to live, ’twill soon be past . . .” Or Isaac Watts: “Time, like an ever-flowing stream, bears all its sons away.” Or the Psalmist: “Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. . . . So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” (Psalm 90) Recently, we have seen several precious church members slip into eternity. Something of the “eternal weight of glory” (II Cor. 4:8) in those rooms has kicked me in the pants. Life is the sum total of tiny choices. And in today’s world of instant grati­fication and endless time-eating distractions, how many choices! Increasingly, we’ll have to decide not between good and bad, but be­tween good and better. What is the better use of my brief moments this afternoon? Do I re­ally need to update my Facebook status every 30 minutes? Do I have to see what my high school classmate is thinking now, compared to what he was thinking just 10 minutes ago? Or should I read my Bible in­stead? Should I pray? The great call of the hour seems to be for self-discipline and self-denial: saying no when no one’s looking, when we can do anything and get away with it; saying no because we fix our eyes on the face of Jesus, who exhorts us to run the race and cast off the sin that so easily besets us (Hebrews 12:1-2). Obviously, Facebook may not be the sin that so easily entangles. But we need to see that whatever consumes the majority of our waking hours is no longer our tool, but our master. At some point we need to say, “Enough! Thus far and no further!” We’ve come to an absurd point when we spend more time comment­ing on our life than actually living it. Thoreau dreaded the idea of a life unlived: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliber­ately . . . and not, when I came to die, dis­cover that I had not lived.” For many today, Facebook acts like a ventilator. First it helped us to breathe; now it does our breathing for us. We move according to its rhythms. We can’t possibly live without it. Our lives have become absorbed in the machine that is the Social Network.



11. Shadowy “Friends”: My eleventh rea­son is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. For all I know, Mr. Zuckerberg may be a much sweeter guy than his fictional counter­part in the movie The Social Network (2010). Maybe he helps the old ladies of Silicon Valley cross the street and has never stabbed any of his friends in the back. Fair enough. But this baby-faced 26-year-old Harvard drop-out sits on top of a Mount Everest of people’s private information. (Zuckerberg, fittingly, means sugar mountain in German.) He’s the virtual head of the third most populous country in the world. He operates the largest database in the world that’s not held by a government. This information was voluntarily handed over to him by over 600 million people in exchange for the “free” services Facebook provides. But is anything ever free? Just recently, Facebook was valued at 50 billion dollars. That’s more than Boeing. Boeing makes jumbo jets; what does Facebook make? So is your service really free? Here’s where a healthy doctrine of man’s de­pravity might come in handy. There are many who think people good if they appear to be good. When the 500-millionth user was added to the Facebook family in July 2010 (the growth is exponential—100 million more have been added since), Guy Roz inter­viewed Mr. Zuckerberg for NPR. He asked what we all want to know: what would keep someone from selling this information in the future? Mr. Zuckerberg’s answer, no doubt de­livered with an impish smile, was simply this: “Trust us.” Now that is stunning! Trust us. Our Founding Fathers wisely instituted “Separa­tion of Powers” precisely because they did not trust us. But here there is no separation of powers. It’s all concentrated in an enterprising 26-year-old sitting on a cache of private infor­mation worth 50 billion dollars. He sets the privacy settings and changes them at will. And there’s no restraint, because he hasn’t taken the personal information from anyone: they’ve given it to him freely, in re­turn for the ability to communicate freely. But the peek-a-boo world is also a surveillance world. The code is always open, at least to its programmers. We’re never alone online. We’re surrounded by a great cloud of wit­nesses: Mr. Zuckerberg and his techies, public prosecutors, government agents, future em­ployers, and who knows what other shadowy lurkers of dubious intent. It’s always helpful to remember that we invite a company of poten­tial future “friends” to look over our shoulder every time we log on. As C. S. Lewis put it, the modern world would say you could have your views when you were alone, and then they’d make sure you were never alone.

12. Face His Book: Finally, the reason that belongs first. The greatest of all friends—the Friend of friends who laid down His life for you and sticks closer than a brother, never to leave you nor forsake you—doesn’t have a Facebook account. We’re exhorted to seek the face of our faithful friend Jesus. But because He’s not on Facebook, we seek all other faces but His. Ask yourself this: Where do you tend to go first? To Facebook, or to the Book where you see His face? Do we seek “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ?” (II Corinthians 4:6). This is the eternal glory that doesn’t fade with a loss of Wi-Fi. We find the glory of Jesus’ face in His Word. Who gets the firstfruits of our waking mo­ments? A recent sign I saw on a church put it pointedly, “Get off of Facebook and get into His Book.” It’s a challenge worth pondering.

If 600 million people are on Facebook, it still means billions in the world aren’t. They might not be part of the global cyber-commu­nity by necessity or by choice. Will Facebook haves still be friends with the have-nots? Will they bother to stay in touch with them? When a couple went through the hard trial of a mis­carriage recently, a close family member didn’t respond. The reason given? The couple wasn’t on Facebook. There would have been a swift condolence posted over Facebook, but alas.

You may think I’ve grossly exaggerated some of these points. Perhaps I have. I’m not trying to be mean-spirited or a fear-mongerer. I’m not even trying to urge you to give up Facebook. I know how much my brother benefits from Facebook as a single missionary in Asia. It may very well be that an active Facebook account is necessary for thriving socially in today’s world. No doubt it’s futile to wish our culture back to the technological simplicity of Little House on the Prairie or Walden Pond. So be it. Then the question for Christians becomes: how do we use Facebook responsibly? In my admittedly conservative view, a healthy use of Facebook in college would involve shar­ing a picture now and then and maybe once a month posting a brief update. I would be espe­cially wary of using it to divulge deep personal matters.

Let’s agree that the danger doesn’t necessarily lie in our tools, but in our lack of self-control that can make us the slavish tool of our tools. Just as we can over­eat in the cafeteria, so we can over consume in our use of technology. Even good things can become addictions if not used in moderation.

Ponder this hypothetical: If Oxford’s halls had been rigged with Wi-fi and Facebook fifty years ago, would we have The Chronicles of Narnia or The Lord of the Rings? Lewis and Tolkien had a wonderful social network: The Inklings. They had a chatroom: The Eagle and Child. You could run your finger along the grain of the benches, hear the tinkle of pewter and cutlery, smell the smoke from Jack’s pipe, and feel the crinkling of paper. Now the room grows quiet. An elfin twinkle flashes from the professor’s eye as he clears his throat and starts reading: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” They were real friends with real faces discussing real books. Is it wrong to lament a human loss here?

Have you ever thought of writing your friend a long letter by hand? People used to do that! Think of how much more meaning­ful it is to find a hand-written letter in your mailbox than a text message on your phone. Have you taken a slow read through a good book lately? How about actually spending time with people face to face? And how about spending more “face-time” with your Lord: “But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” (II Corinthians 3:18). There’s no satisfaction in the world to com­pare with this one: “As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.” (Psalm 17:15). “When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, LORD, will I seek.” (Psalm 27:8). We become like what we spend most face-time with. We seek His face when we face His Book.