Hey Man Slow Down: The Art of Friendship Behind The Screen IV
I need to finish this series of four articles on Technology and how its affecting our lives in positive and negative ways before it gets away from me. When I first sat down to write about all of this it was because of a couple of prompts; my reading the Time Magazine article on multitasking and teenagers, my reading a book I had just finished by Joseph Grassi and an experience I had on the train. As I have been writing and thinking about all this, there was one last topic I felt I need to bring up: friendship in the technological age.
The Time Article aks this question,
If you're IMing four friends while watching That '70s Show, it's not the same as sitting on the couch with your buddies or your sisters and watching the show together. Or sharing a family meal across a table. Thousands of years of evolution created human physical communication–facial expression, body language–that puts broadband to shame in its ability to convey meaning and concrete bonds. What happens…as we replace side-by-side and eye-to-eye human connections with quick, disembodied exchanges?
Though I think this statement is leaning a bit too far on the negative side of the discussion, the question is still worth asking. What is the difference between 'real' and 'virtual' relationships (when I say real I mean a physical face-to-face friendship, I don't mean that online/virtual friendships can't be real in an authentic way)? What are the advantages and disadvantages of both? There are certainly some negative implications for behind-the-screen-only friendships but let's not demonize it either. We need to learn how these tools are useful in cultivating meaningful relationships, and cultivate the kinds of behaviors that continue to encourage teens in relationships that are healthy; whether they are virtual or 'real' is only secondary.
The Church and Technological Communication
Steve Johnson's “Viewpoint” in Time, was much more optimistic and realistic when he said,
Is all this screen time diminishing the kids' face-to-face social skills? Hardly. Remember, the total number of hours spent in front of a screen has not increased over the past 10 years. Teenagers are irrepressibly social animals; its in their DNA. They're not using the technology to replace their real-world social life; they're using technology to augment it.
Churches tend to fear and push away anything new that threatens the status quo, or challenges our control over the lives of those in the congregation. This is why many youth pastors are beside themselves over social networking sites like myspace, Friendster, Orkut, and Facebook. Of course there is reason for concern, when those places are used in ways that abuse other people, but this may be even more reason for the church to have its own myspace pages and be involved in social networks. I don't really like myspace, I don't use it, in fact I try not to use it but I am forced to go to my myspace account at least once a day because people use it to communicate with me in one form or another. Myspace is hard to avoid, even if you try because there are at least 43 million people on myspace making it a social force in the lives of a lot of people.
IMing and e-mail offer yet more ways to get connected and stay connected to people. No form of communication is as good as actual face-to-face conversation, but many of us do not have the luxury to be face-to-face all the time. The informality that is involved with IMing and e-mail is also very useful in communicating at times. In terms of doing youth ministry, and using technology for getting to know teens things like myspace, AIM, blogging, and e-mail are all ways that can create informal relationships with teens; teenagers especially want to have space to get to know people, especially adults. These newer forms of communicating give us ways to see pictures, get to know some basic stuff, and learn a little about others without feeling like your in some kind of committed friendship. I think that people, especially those within the church, need to be versed in using these forms of communicating with others.
Adding and Taking Away
There are downfalls to all of this, I don't want to pretend that there aren't, but the most dangerous one is trading 'real' friendships for the virtual ones. We should use e-mail to supplement our real relationships, and for building friendships with people in other parts of the world. But if I spend 10 hours this week chatting online, blogging, and doing whatever people do on myspace, and only 2 hours hanging out with my friends who live near me I think that a perversion has arisen. I realize this is a different perspective than some, but I find things like myspace, AIM, e-mail best when they are tools for supplementing friendships not replacing them. Its always best to keep in mind, the more we add to our lives them more other things get neglected or taken away. I've talked about this more fully in part two of this series.
Practices of Friendship, Access and Boundary
Today all people, not just Christians, need to focus on practices that cultivate healthy lives, technology can both aid or harm in this pursuit. We need to practice friendship in both its 'real' and 'virtual' forms, but for some of us (and as time progresses more and more of us) will need to focus more intentionally on face-to-face friendships as a means of knowing and being known. People isolated from physical communities of friends will not be able to find the depth of possibilities for their own life because we were created to live in community with one another, “Let us create them in our own image (Gen. 1:27);” online friendships can be a part of this but it will never help anyone it if totally replaces it.
Finally The last comment I wanted to make is that increasingly we will need to work out how much we will allow ourselves to be accessed, what kinds of boundaries do we need to live healthy lives? I don't know yet, but I do know that when I turn off my computer and my phone there is a freedom and rest that I find. We all need to have some boundaries from these things, what those boundaries are or should be will have to be worked out in community.
It barks at no else but me
Like it's seen a ghost
I guess it seen the sparks a-flowing
No one else would know
Hey man, slow down
Slow down
Idiot, slow down
Slow down
Sometimes I get overcharged
That's when you see sparks
You ask me where the hell i'm going?
At a thousand feet per second
Hey man, slow down
Slow down
Idiot, slow down
slow down
Hey man, slow down
Slow down
Idiot, slow down
slow down
Radiohead – the Tourist
**And speaking of AIM – you can reach me on it at gatheringinlight if you have any questions about what I've written here.
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