What I Learned from Fastbooking

May 29, 2009 by djackson.

I gave up Facebook for Lent. Well, I wasn’t going to give up coffee.

Lent has become an important season to me. It’s probably because I’m a Baptist and discovered the liturgical calendar late in life. Nothing worse than a convert, you know? And of course there’s the whole Beverly Hillbillies aspect to it, the ecclesiastical equivalent of marveling at the “cement pond”. Expose Baptists to liturgy and we’re like trailer trash eating off china for after a lifetime of paper plates.

All the same, I’ve come to look forward to Lent as a time when things slow down. I think the quote is apocryphal, but Einstein supposedly explained the theory of relativity by comparing a minute spent with one’s hand on a hot stove lid to an hour spent in the company of a beautiful woman. (He didn’t, as far as I know, comment on how the same hour felt to the woman but we’ll let that go.) Anyway, the point is the same: forty days’ regular forbearance of a favorite food or activity becomes a long time, meaning that I have longer to ponder the mysteries of the incarnation and the crucifixion, and to yearn for Easter.

So as I pondered my response this year, Facebook seemed like a natural. I’d begun to experience the social networking site as a kind of microchip caffeine: brief updates bounce like handballs from the back wall of my head to the reciprocal hard surfaces of cyberspace, ricochet to another recipient who smacks them with the additional energy of his own comments and off we go. But it gets noisy - internally so. I found myself at odd moments rummaging through my mental slip bucket looking for scraps from which to cobble a new status update. Not satisfied to keep everyone posted on how recently I’d eaten a burrito, I began to regard these cyber-snippets as a sort of haiku. Writers never simply type; we invariable compose.

So I shut down. Noah mainlined Dramamine and shoveled elephant dung over the gunwail for forty days. Moses spelunked on Sinai and peeped out at the Almighty just before the door shut. Elijah ate angel food cake and did a walkabout and listened to praise music from Earth, Wind, and Fire in an attempt to achieve theophany. Jesus, of course, went mano-a-mano with Mephistopheles, duked it out with El Diablo in the desert and took a TKO in the third. Me, I stayed off Facebook.

It was nice. Quiet, as I had anticipated. And a few people said really kind things about missing me. I missed it, of course, which is at least part of the point. As with most asceticisms, this one came without the optional epiphanies - no locutions, no visions, I’m still short. But I did take a little time to ponder how the sudden explosion of constant connectivity may be affecting my soul. (I’m not going all Charismatic here; your soul is not something indiscrete from your body so everything you do affects it. That’s why eating a Big Mac - or not - is an act of spiritual (de)formation.)

While offline, I read an article in the New York Times Magazine, April 16. The author, Virginia Heffernan, quoted a line delivered by Bruce Sterling at the South By Southwest tech conference in Austin. If you’re not from Texas, try to understand that Austin is hyper-cool, like Silicon Valley with spurs. A venue like that - a technology-fest in the Lone Star version of San Francisco - makes Sterling’s remark all the more striking: “Poor folk,” he sniped, “love their cell phones.” Meaning . . . what? Heffernan parses:

“Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.

I didn’t think too much of it all at the time; didn’t ponder it, in fact, until I’d returned to Facebook after Resurrection Sunday and saw a friend’s comment on that exact subject. My friend is a woman whom I’ve known since her childhood and who now, as a young adult, continues to delight me with the same freshness and frankness she showed as a preteen, youth, and college student. She’s doing some sort of masters degree in business, marketing, that kind of thing and made a remark to the effect that she is now on Twitter, not because she likes it but because she can’t afford to shun an important self-marketing tool. A person with a very strong soul, she now meets Heffernan’s definition of poverty: “those without better options” than a symbiotic synthesis with beeping and buzzing gadgets.

Yet I had managed, almost on a whim, to unplug for forty days. Is my soul stronger than my young friend’s, or is it only that my wallet is fatter? Or the happy accident of having chosen a profession sufficiently stodgy that I can remain safely behind the times? Sterling’s vignette of “the man of leisure,” filtered through Heffernan’s midrash, reminded me of a passage from C. S. Lewis’ too-often-neglected spiritual autobiography, The Pilgrim’s Regress. John, the protagonist, and Vertue, his traveling companion, happen upon Mr. Sensible, a sort of Thomas Jefferson character holed up in his private Monticello and attempting self-sufficiency, a goal he pursues by importing luxuries and off-loading the dirty work to his servant, Drudge. Vertue, who has absolutely no party manners whatsoever, catechizes the old phony and sums up: “Your art, then, seems to teach men that the best way of being happy is to enjoy unbroken good fortune in every respect. They would not all find the advice helpful.” The Jefferson reference is apt: T.J. lived the vigorous life of bold independence with no more assistance than a tumescent bank account and an army of slaves.

This troubles me. Was my Lenten fast, my “sacrifice,” really nothing more than self-indulgent luxuriating in the well-upholstered accidents of my age, education, and profession? “Take no thought for the morrow” means different things depending on whether you must say, “sufficient to the day is the evil thereof” or “thou hast much goods laid up for many years.”

Then I stumbled across an interview with Dr. Pauline Wiessner, an anthropologist from the University of Utah. She spent some time in the ’70’s hanging out with Bushmen in the Kalahari desert and discovered that their whole program of social security, health care, and insurance consists of maintaining good relationships. They tell stories about distant relatives and send them beautiful handmade gifts. Then when a famine strikes (the Bushman equivalent of a subprime lending crisis), they go visit their better-heeled kin until things turn around. The interviewer asked Dr. Wiessner if she sees any examples of similar behavior in American society. Her reply stunned me:

Facebook. People who use it say it keeps memories of distant friends alive and it sometimes brings long-lost relationships back home. . . .One constantly hears stories of people finding jobs and business opportunities through these sites. Hey, and what does a blogger do? Tell stories! The videos and snapshots that people post echo the exchange gifts of the (Bushmen). They are a kind of token that says, “I’ve kept you alive in my heart.”

Of course, the same day’s paper had an article about how American teenagers are dangerously sleep-deprived and have repetitive-stress injuries to their thumbs from the ratcheting demand to pay the social tax of constant connectivity. Adolescents, of course, live in constant fear of social poverty and so never feel free to cease sowing and reaping and gathering into barns.

Well, Lent is over, Christ is risen, and I’m back on Facebook. This Sunday is Pentecost and then we’re back to Ordinary for the next half-year or so. Maybe that’s the best place to work out these aspects of our salvation after all - the non-color-coded sequence of days spent waiting for Our Lord’s return. It will always be a mixed bag, a trade-off between radical trust in God and disguised trust in man. Maybe that’s why Paul added the part about “fear and trembling.” Because we can never be certain whether we’re well-souled or simply well-heeled until our final status post reads, “And so we shall ever be with the Lord.”

Posted in General | No Comments »