Sometimes I enjoy Facebook. I’ll admit it.
Social networking can enhance our regular face-to-face friendships and provide a way to stay in contact with friends who live overseas or out of state.
Facebook’s fun because friendship is fun—and research even shows we’re healthiest and most fulfilled when we feel connected to others.
Still, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also wonder about Facebook’s potential … hitches.
In the brave new virtual world of clever status updates, wall posts and the chain-letter phenomenon “25 Things About Me,” some wonder whether we are really fostering a community, or merely garnering an audience. And in this age when the very definition of friendship is blurred by the Internet (Is a high school classmate I barely knew 20 years ago really my friend?), community looks much different than it did even five years ago.
Jesse Rice has a few thoughts on all of this. In his book The Church of Facebook, Rice presents the pros of our social networking age, but also discusses how virtual friendships look almost exactly like physical friendships—with significant and potentially menacing differences. For one, deep friendship develops with shared face-to-face moments and enough privacy to discuss serious issues. The very public world of Facebook can be an environment of grandstanding and profile management. He goes on to say:
Relationships require, among other things, time. As the number of our relationships grows, the less time we have for each one. As a result our communication events (i.e., the ways in which we relate to one another) must necessarily become more superficial. After all, we simply don’t have time to keep up with each one of our Facebook friends via long e-mails or a shared meals or extended private face-to-face conversations. Instead we have just enough time for a quick wall posting, a shared video link, or a one-sentence update.
But what do you think? Is Facebook an ego boost, a healthy outlet to laugh at friends’ goings-on, or a “place” to foster actual real-life groups of friends who will love and hold one another accountable? Or, in this complex virtual age, is it all of the above? And how has it changed the way we view community?
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