First, an anecdote. When Facebook first came to the University of Colorado, I imagine we were school number 50 or so. It was 2004 and back then the homepage to Facebook had the list of schools it was at on the home page. I resisted, it was my desire to be anti-establishment and a narcissistic desire to set myself apart from the social tide. That is, until I was indicted for my contrived resistance. I believe it was my friends Kayla and Tory who cut to my ego, calling out my shallow desire for disambiguation. I joined. I believed in the tool. To be clear, I believe in Social Networking. I think Twitter and Facebook have incredible potential. Twitter in many ways has maintained a safer distance from the intercourse of corporate narrative and personal anecdote (watch this video to see how your experiences in real life can be used as free marketing). Twitter continues to be a true site of social networking, a strong utility for revolutions and protests, down to the sharing of content between friends. Which has caused me to beg the function of Facebook in my life.
Last year I experimented with not having a phone. Of course there is a sort of isolationism in such a choice and it could be an egotistical power grab assuming my time is worth more than “all those people” trying to get in touch with me. But it was really motivated by the desire to spend my days walking places, without calling someone to fill my time with distracted conversation, and instead…think.pray.read. I think there are some serious bankruptcies we are experiencing by not working with our hands and being in real tangible community. I wrote an essay touching on the need for Missional Households exploring how we need to eat together, farm together, pray together, unrelated to digital expression. There is a surrealism we are experiencing where we email each other, Facebook, Twitter, about things, particularly actions of the Church, that we never fully realize. How much do Churches email about helping the poor, mention it on Facebook? Here is a question, do you spend your day reading about justice online, talking about mercy over email? Now ask this question, when was the last time your hand touched the shoulder of a homeless person? Depending on how long that has been, you might live in an alternate universe.
You can even see this in my last post about Urban Mission and Gentrification. An update on that situation is that I got a Facebook message from our Neighborhood Association regarding an “African American man who knocked on my door and ‘had the wrong house’…so keep your eyes open.” We are able to communicate in this alternate universe instead of talking to each other, describing the man, finding out if some one knows he is not a criminal.
The exploration of the influence of Facebook on my life came into full effect while I was with my wife Erin in Guatemala. We were in remote places with no internet. She had just come from even MORE remote mountain villages, where she cooked over a fire and slept in a hut. We touched coffee plants growing wild on hillsides, met local villagers, rode on boats, climbed a Volcano…and I felt this addictive urge to capture it on video and photograph to disseminate through my Facebook for the sake of my individual branding. I was creating experiences, in a wild and adventurous landscape, to portray them to my online community. What a sad tension, to cheapen the real life experience of holding dry, still warm volcanic ash in my hand or to break open a cherry from a coffee plant and taste the mucilage on the green bean, by trying to “act like” I was holding dry, still warm volcanic ash in my hand or to break open a cherry from a coffee plant and taste the mucilage on the green bean.
What has pushed me further is media content I’ve watched in the past few weeks. This clip from SNL is a great commentary on the differing functions of online content, to either expose or empower corporations and governments. In addition to that satire, I saw The Social Network. I love the scene where Zuckerberg runs into his old girlfriend from B.U. at a bar. Her life is existing, with friends, enjoying food and drink, completely independent of the online empire he had constructed. The Facebook founders succeeded, they got us to live our life in reality, with an orientation toward how it would relate to our contrived online persona.
What really pushed me over the edge was the incredibly depressing documentary We Live In Public (WARNING: the movie and trailer have graphic and vulgar content). Watching the experiments of Josh Harris in the ’90’s, especially the Quiet community in NYC, was a sick hyperbole of our actual lives on Facebook. When I say depressing, I do not mean bad. It is a great, though vulgar and disturbing movie about the evolution of the internet. But Josh, just like Jesse Eisenberg’s “character” in The Social Network is delusional of his “pseudo-relationships.” The ones dreaming of an online dimension in real life community are completely bankrupt of real experiences like love and sensuality in food, drink, laughter, and tears.
Being without a phone for a year, spending a week without the internet (only to dream of how to relay the experience back), have led me to a cross roads that was convicted by this piece in Adbusters. My favorite, most painful quote, is
In the past, my feelings toward Facebook and similar social networking sites had swung between a genuine sense of connection and community to the uncomfortable awareness that what all of our blogs, online journals and personal profiles really amounted to was serious narcissism. As my feelings of over-exposure continued to mount, the obvious solution would have been to set limits on my Facebook time – yet I still found myself sucked in for longer periods every time I visited.
This has been my experience exactly. After some research, I found you can disable your account without losing your content, which I find a prudent enough gesture to experiment with a Facebook-less life. I hope Facebook topples, I hope it is not the terminus of social networking. It has served its function in the evolution of the internet and it has inspired social networking for democratic revolutions and organization of community. So with that, I am signing off. I heard it put in these terms somewhere…if you spend 10 hours a week on Facebook (which I probably do), you could get a part-time job. That means you could make a living for yourself, rather than making a living FOR Mark Zuckerberg. I hope you’ll join me in unplugging for awhile…or forever? To end, in the words of Carmen Joy King from Adbusters…
And so I quit… As I sit here, keyboard under palm, eyes on screen, I try to remind myself that my hands and eyes need to venture out into the community and look and touch the truly tangible that lies just beyond that other big screen: my window.
austin pfeiffer 