A Strange New World 11-15-10

Anderson, South Carolina

Recently an elaborate survey completed by Forbes determined who the sixty-eight most powerful people on earth are, the one in a hundred million people who make the biggest difference in our lives. “The people on this list were chosen because, in various ways, they bend the world to their will. They are heads of state, major religious figures, entrepreneurs and outlaws.” Four criteria were used to evaluate potential candidates for the list. 1) Individuals must have influence over large numbers of people. 2) They should have substantial financial resources relative to their peers. 3) These leaders should be able to project their power in multiple ways. 4) Candidates should be actively wielding their power. Incredulously, a completely unknown twenty year old college drop-out went from obscurity to number 40 on this list by virtue of figuring out a way to connect his friends together with an obscure program he called Facebook. In six years his Facebook program went from connecting eight people to nearly six hundred million.

The influence of Facebook is staggering. The posting of comments by teenagers and young adults, berating others in cyber space, has provoked a rash of suicides. Employers nix job applicants because of things found in their Facebook news feeds. Friendships disrupt because users of Facebook forget the whole world is watching. It’s as if the whole world has turned into an audience of cyber-voyeurs. Personal material posted for 580 million users to see is stunning. Every non-profit agency and community organization is falling over itself to establish a clear Facebook presence. Most of us who write or do creative visual work would not have a possibility of success without a clear Facebook presence. Facebook is used as a screening tool by those considering relational involvements.

In the past year or so, a year in which a couple hundred million people have been added to the Facebook database, a number of my friends have been lost to the embedded games in the Facebook operating system. I once had vibrant daily interactions with individuals in the gym, over dinner, in church, in the community playhouse, even by phone and e-mail. A number of these have been lost to Farmville, Priestville, Lexulous, and other cyber-based games. Curiously, these very people lament not having time to keep up with life and friends.

The level of connectivity possible with Facebook has a sinister downside. Professional counselors are now often speaking of compromised marriages resulting from the ease of finding long-lost high school flames or other individuals at great distance in time or space. In my own experience I see married persons seriously jeopardizing the well being of their marriages and the security of their children by maintaining clandestine text threads with others in the cyber world. More than a few long-term marriages have been lost via Ethernet. It’s as if it’s too easy to get up close and personal in this strange new world without borders or rules.

Alas, it’s also a strangely impersonal way to find out about milestones in the lives of people we thought ourselves close to. More than once I’ve learned of deaths and funerals through ransom encounters with news feeds in Facebook. Only today did I learn of a good friend’s journey out of state for a funeral, through a FB newsfeed not intended for me. I discover the birth of grandchildren by following news feeds in this detached cyber world. Vacations and walks in the park with one’s dog seem to be celebrated on Facebook. The private, inane, and often crass doings of daily life seem to be celebrated here as well, often provoking an amazingly intense thread of commentary. I can put up a heartfelt missive about something and am rewarded with utter silence. Often I have published photo collections of the most sublime places on earth and not heard from a single individual. Recently a FB user commented about a crass personal toileting activity, spawning a thread of more than twenty comments. I no longer know what’s important to people in life.

My phone rarely rings any more. Even the amount of personal e-mail I receive has plunged; group forwards of jokes and PowerPoint shows don’t count. Individuals once part of my physical world have faded into one of hundreds of so-called FB friends.

In this strange new world, one also experiences the painful reality of exclusion; that one has been disenfranchised from parts of one’s community. A social group, once vibrant and important to me, has developed inner circles excluding some of us, marginalizing us to the ranks of the ostensibly uninformed. Before Zuckerman invented Facebook it was easy to have a party and not invite once-favored individuals, now cut from the short list. Ignorance was bliss. With Facebook I find out in real time of parties celebrated by people who no longer welcome me. Groups once playing into my decisions to stay put in my town take happy voyages and journeys to far flung places, without me. How strange it is to be working on publications, only to find on a news feed I’ve been delisted from another part of my world. More and more, people are exteriorizing their cyber lives and we unwitting voyeurs of these lives find our physical worlds shrinking, a birthday party at a time.

Ancient writings of the Apostles tell us of a time when people shared their worldly goods, meals, dreams, even their fears. Individuals were truly part of community, living mindful in the present in time and space. “Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”

A recent AT&T ad proclaims, “Finally, a phone to save us from our phones.” It’s not likely the Apostles were speaking of people being saved from their phones, but there might be some merit in being saved from a murky cyber world devoid of rules and admitted into a world devoid of delete keys. It’s our choice to embrace a way of living where our life is recorded in the Lamb’s Book of Life rather than the archives of Zuckerman’s Facebook.