"Happy Birthday"
"Happy B-Day"
"Happiest B-Day"
Rather inexpressive and unoriginal, eh? This, sadly, is the consistency of the vast majority of my communication with specific personages. To the general masses I proclaim my various opinions on politics, religion, and various other minutia I feel entitled to discourse on. It's because of these vast, open-ended conversations we call social networking that argumentation, communication, and community are dissolving ever faster in modern society.
For some reason, we have put an immeasurable importance on the ability to enter characters onto the great scrolling edifice of the Facebook news feed. In many ways, it reflects the attributes of one historical wall, that is, the Berlin Wall.
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| Die Schandmauer |
However, if we go a little deeper, we find more profound attributes shared by social networking and the Wall of Shame. What was on either side of the construct in the capital city of East Germany? On one hand, there was the thriving, Western society of West Berlin. Free expression, personal liberty, and the free market existed and grew to overthrow the society on the other side. East Berlin was a reflection on the rest of the country. It was a culture of oppression, fear, paranoia, and the incredible mass of impersonal administration known as The State. On one side, mankind was taking dominion. On the other, mankind was being dominated. What therefore exists on either side of the occurrence and sudden popularity of social networking? A culture still interested in interpersonal communication, and another culture willing to trade this for impersonal communication. Not too long ago, it was not uncommon to compose and send well-thought out articles of communication called letters. These were meant to arrange the author's feelings and musings to a specific person or group of people. They were not meant to be broadcast to the world at large. Nor would one go to the trouble of arranging one's thoughts, putting them to written word, and sending them if all one was going to communicate was a random witticism or sentiment on the evening repast. This lead to only thoughts worth thinking being communicated and dealt with by society at large. Even if the specific contents were somewhat trivial, it was meant to hold more relevance to the sender and receiver than to humanity in general anyway.
Compare what was true then to what is true now. When one crosses the Checkpoint Charlie of the Google+ signup page and enters into the East Berlin of the internet and society, one's attitudes about interaction completely change. It becomes socially acceptable to reduce one's interactions with one's "friends" to a mere wishing of a joyful day on the anniversary of their entrance into this world. Ironically, we celebrate social networking most when we remind people of the world outside. When not performing this most tedious and toilsome of required actions on social networks, one has options indeed. Profess some conviction about religion and one is instantaneously attacked or silently judged. At best, those holding a similar view need not express any kind of meaningful praise. No, Mr. Zuckerberg has given to the masses the ability to simply "like" any particular post, thus making our admirers the most impersonal of all. Profess some political conviction and the same reaction is given. There is incredible pressure to conform. A certain friend of mine has questioned me on my reasoning on posting anything about my personal convictions on Facebook. I inferred that the idea was to avoid notoriety. To avoid standing out. To ease our consciences of this grip of fear that people may not like us, we then try to posit some worthless sentiment on the consistency of the nourishment we are currently consuming or express an equally worthless sentiment on the weather of the day. Thus we relegate true conviction to a hidden part of ourselves that we are more and more afraid of talking about. Yet we tell ourselves that this is not true, by creating minor controversies so insignificant as to baffle any cultural outsider as to the apparent need to comment on them. For example, the author has a particular fondness for the features and philosophical foundations of the Fab Four. Perhaps he might post this on Facebook, and anyone dissenting may vent their dislike of great art in the comment section of the post. Thus a minor controversy is started, but no meaningful takeaways are provided. Life is never enriched an iota by someone proclaiming, "The Beatles suck!"
There also exists a sense of dark foreboding about the popularity and ubiquity of social networking that all participants who hold to something so temporal, so secular, as a pulse must inevitably feel embodied. That is, Mark Zuckerberg has accomplished in 8 years what Central Intelligence or the KGB have been trying to make a reality for decades and decades. There now exists a medium for every member of society, regardless of social strata, wealth, or personal significance to continuously provide anyone observing with a means to track one's personal features, appearances, whereabouts, likes, dislikes, companions, employment situation, personal weaknesses, personal strengths, and even one's musical tastes. How vast the horrors we visit upon ourselves in the name of progress. This creates a feeling of either intense paranoia or disturbing complacency among all users. Recently, it has come to my attention that people are posting legal terms stating that they do not wish to be tracked or observed by anyone other than their friends on their news feeds. What is the implication? Simply this: Every post, every picture, every video one chooses to share with the world is considered duly noted automatically by governments and nameless entities too dark to imagine unless otherwise explicitly stated. But no data exists to support the claim that these new "legal terms" created by the user are honored by the social networks. How does this differ than the world we saw behind the Iron Curtain? Indeed, one is left with two options after joining an online community. The first is to totally accept it, and post everything about oneself, and be willingly observed and watched. The second is to be what is known as a "lurker", that is, to create a profile and maintain a non-existent presence. The latter option self-defeats the purpose of joining such a group in the first place, while the former's predicament should be self-evident.
The result of this situation is that interpersonal interaction has become shallow, meaningless, and worthless. With the number of Facebook users swelling to upwards of 1 billion, the world has reached the point where this is the new normal. Our fathers worked to defeat a society and worldview and culture that dehumanized people. Our generation works to build an online reality that goes farther than any radical social scientist could imagine 20 years ago. Willful de-personalization, willful loss of humanity has become the newly minted expectation of society. What do I mean by this? Isn't this all a tad extreme? Loss of humanity? Seriously? Yes, seriously. Humans were meant to interact. We were meant to reason together, to build together, to share our thoughts and feelings, to express our emotions, to interact with and influence culture. But all of this requires artful communication that takes time and effort. Labor has been required of man to achieve anything good since The Fall. Ever since, man has looked for ways to avoid work, and to find a different way to effect the same ends. But, the essence of humanity is the upward struggle. A mighty battle against ourselves to redeem what we lost, and to change the world in a good way makes up the very fabric of human existence. Now we spend hours and hours of our preciously short lives commenting on the most trivial, the most stupid and irrelevant details of our temporal existences, forgetting the deadly seriousness of our spiritual lives, and the legacies we leave behind. After all, who wants written on their headstone the number of Facebook friends they had? It doesn't matter in any way, shape, or form. What does matter? What one does for the good of humanity, in the service of the Lord. That matters.
Is there another option? Yes. Can we scale the Wall? We can. Is there an escape route to West Berlin? One does indeed exist. Practically speaking, I invite you to join me on a grand experiment. Deactivate or delete every single one of your social networking accounts. Take a stand against the rising tide of The Fall, redeem what is being lost. Choose to talk to the person sitting next to you. And don't have an insignificant conversation. Have a discussion that will force both of you to look at the world, to wonder at the universe in all of its mystery and grandeur. Find the design to life, don't obscure it with pictures of the sandwich you just ate.
In conclusion, social networking actively works to destroy good cultural interaction. The first being that a good argument require more than 30 seconds of time to develop and more than 140 characters to state. The second is that any argument made is assaulted as being either controversial or irrelevant. Secondly, social networking destroys good communication. We satisfy our social impulses now by agreeing that the lunch our acquaintance had indeed looks excellent. Social networking hurts us in yet a third way by denying us a community of any depth. The idea of a great societal discussion has been reduced from the Lincoln-Douglas debates to whatever ways we can beat a dead horse with whichever new meme has just begun its fifteen minutes of fame. One of our most celebrated presidents once stated, "Ich bin ein berliner." He said this at a time when West Berlin was under direct threat of existence. All that advanced society held dear was pictured by West Berlin. All that humanity struggled against was contained in East Berlin. We are all Berliners. The question is, which side do we live on?
