Tag Archives: Facebook

We are the media

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The other day at our pastor’s meeting we were talking about communication and all the different ways we try to hold together and influence the world as a network of cells and congregations in Christ. We are pretty good at holding together and influencing the world, but it is difficult.

In the middle of an elaborate dialogue about how we can best communicate, we had a little “Pentecost.” It centered on Facebook. We started talking about what Facebook makes us do to talk to people: how it restricts us, how it commodifies us, and how it tries to use us to make money. We asked, “Why are we doing this? What monster are we paying to communicate? What rules are we learning for relating?”

Be the media

Someone said, “Why don’t we just desert it and stop using the medium and focus on being the medium? We already have a great communication system. It is called living in community. Let’s focus on being the media, not on conforming to some other rubric. Let’s be face to face, not Facebook.” It was like a little fire burned through us. I heard Peter preaching “Be saved from this wicked and perverse generation!” in Acts 2. I have been building the Facebook pyramid for a long time. Increasingly, it tells me to produce bricks without straw. Why would I willingly do this with all the people I love best?

So I am going into the wilderness without Facebook all through the summer at least. Maybe I will be led to escape from all the other social media, as well. I won’t be Instagrammed any more or pinned, tumbled or tweeted, perhaps. I started saying good bye to my 1600+ friends on Facebook the other day. I could tell that I might be doing the right thing because it was hard to disentangle myself from that “everyday affair.” For one thing, it is not like I don’t use Facebook for good things, influence people for good, represent Jesus there or keep up with all sorts of loved ones.

But for another thing, in just one decade (surprisingly, the same decade in which Circle Thrift has been thriving) Facebook has conformed me to a brand new way to think of “friends,” to say happy birthday, to announce important things in my life and to present myself to the world. It has been fun and beneficial in some ways. But has it been right and are the results what I really want? I’m not so sure. The fact that it is hard to extract myself, makes me wonder. “Has the social media got so many of my friends locked in that I won’t even know anything about them unless Facebook mediates our communication?” That one question is enough to make me want to flee back to being a person again and not just an image or message mediated by a faceless machine. I think I want my face back.

Yesterday we celebrated how God honors us by including us in his spiritual reality and investing himself in ours. I am the vessel God chose to fill with his content. When the Holy Spirit came upon the gathered believers, God made his preferred media plain; it is people. God’s face can be seen in Jesus followers and in the acts of the body of Christ. Every time that reality gets undercut by locking it in a book, even the Good Book, especially Facebook, I think something goes missing. We lose the significance of God becoming incarnate in Jesus and undermine the reality that the Holy Spirit is continuing to incarnate Jesus in each and all of us.

So for the summer, for sure, I want to get rid of as much internet communication as seems reasonable and have a face-to-face season. The more I think about it, the more important it seems. I began wondering what “face-to-face” really meant, and I realized more about how conformed we have become to machines. If you are twenty, you’ve spent ten years with Facebook. Mark Zuckerburg may have influenced you more than Jesus when it comes to making relationships. The other day some therapists who were part of my research were lamenting that they often run into children texting their parents from their bedroom! One teen said, ”I don’t talk to my parents about my grades; they can check it all on line.” You probably have your own anecdotes, like all the times you want to say something to someone on the bus and you have to get them to stop looking at their screen or to take out their ear phones in order to do it.

Human communication

We may not be able to change the way the world works. It often caves in on itself anyway, so we don’t always need to figure that out. But as far as we are concerned as the body of Christ gathered as Circle of Hope, we should perfect the amazing, human communication system we already have, not conform to the monsters that eat our time and don’t produce truth and love. I am talking about perfecting the face-to-face network we have in our cells and public meetings, and all the other ways we connect in our neighborhoods and teams. Why shouldn’t I rely on you to speak the truth in love? Why would I “go over your head,” so to speak, and rely on some faceless machine to broadcast what the Spirit is offering through me? Why would I reduce your importance to a “like” icon or a comment?

Why shouldn’t I be saved from this perverse generation?! So I am going off social media so I can be social media. I am not interesting in damning all use of whatever “social media” is, or in adjudicating what being off it might mean as if I were trying to create some postmodern holiness code. Not me! I just want to reinforce our own communication system rather than spending the hours doing all the work it takes to use the machines that try to get in the middle of it and wheedle their way into being indispensable until they can steer me where they want and steer my riches into their coffers. What do you think? (Don’t tell me on my wall).

Will the new Amtrak mural fit with your aesthetic?

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Do “gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people” (whatever that might mean)? And what does Jesus think and feel about that? Let’s mentalize about it.

The other day one of our pastors, Jonny Rashid, posted an interesting article on Facebook about which I have been thinking ever since. It was a potpourri of commentary on changing Eastern cities in reaction to the new mural Amtrak and the National Endowment of the Arts have commissioned Philadelphia’s famous Mural Arts program to oversee. They want to do something to beautify a bit of the ride from 30th St. Station to the usually-deserted North Philadelphia station. Sarah Kendzior labeled the whole project an example of The Peril of Hipster Economics and Aljazeera printed her thoughts. Her criticism was in direct response to a Wall Street Journal article called Fighting Urban Blight with Art by Jessica Dawson.amtrak

Your aesthetic

Among the many colorful and true things in Kendzior’s article was this incendiary gem: “Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.” She did not define the term aesthetics, which was probably a good idea, since people are having trouble doing that. The term generally refers to the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty. What she really meant to say, probably, was that “hipsters tend to see people in relation to their aesthetic.”

We are not doing too much fighting about the philosophy of aesthetics these days, since it was a very modern invention of German philosophers and we are pretty much post-modern, or heading there. But we are talking a lot about the ideas and feelings that characterize and guide artistic movements — their aesthetic. Everything has a design aesthetic (Apple being notorious for this). But since in consumer capitalism people are also commodities it becomes logical to decide what your personal aesthetic is, the “look” that fits your “brand.” “Hipsters” (do we still call people hipsters?) have their own sense of what is aesthetically pleasing. Even more, they, as individuals, have their own aesthetic. They have a “look” they are constrained to present. That’s the part of all of this that interests me. In this sense, we are all becoming hipsters and have our own personal aesthetic.

ted mack agtWe should not be surprised that the great grandchildren of people who appeared on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour have multiplied into a society in which everyone can sing, dance and feel obligated to present themselves as a work of art, because America’s got talent! Everyone has a sense of how to present themselves according to their own aesthetic. We have TV shows devoted to our living rooms and wardrobes and the image-driven social media into which we are locked demands a certain art of self-definition. Critics will tell you if what you have done is “overworked” or over-designed because we are supposed to look like we don’t really fret over how we look! We are so generally narcissistic, as a society, that it might be possible, as Kendzior accuses, for people to see other people as elements, or not, of their aesthetic. Ethics may be in the process of quickly being reduced to aesthetics.

Facebookization

Is the new mural just more Disneyfication of the landscape? The Inquirer said, “Soon…droves of art-hungry tourists may be making” a “pilgrimage” to North Philly to see the strange experiment. Like the surreal Disney World carved out of the uninhabitable central Florida, a bit of unreality is creeping into North Philly. Like facades on Mainstreet USA, the artists can mask the reality of poverty and injustice behind their aesthetically-satisfying mural. Masking reality is the Disney specialty. Will the natives of North Philly dance for the tourists when they come to visit like “cast members” (that’s Disney employees are called) do in Florida? Will new North Philly trinkets be invented to sell as a memento of a tourist’s visit to the foreign country through which they have been speeding all these years?

Or is the new mural just a logical expression of the Facebookization of persons? Can we really even talk about differing communities talking to one another now (like Amtrak talking to North Philly), since relating is reduced to images connecting virtually so often? Everyone is required by the omnipresent social media engines to present themselves with some kind of aesthetic choice. How I decide to present my image is important, since most of our communication is reduced to images. Our lives tend to be captions to pictures, titles to images that represent our interests and accomplishments. We are reduced to gravatars and icons. We no longer even have to have someone take our picture; we’ve been reduced to selfies. Is it any surprise that so-called hipsters would be more interested in a neighborhood’s aesthetic than with the people in it? How it photographs is important to them.

The mural gives people still interested in ethics a perfect example of the insanity of how money is spent in Philly. $300,000 will be spent on a temporary mural while behind it people will keep scraping by and starving. It is an ethical nightmare — a Disney choice by Facebooked numbskulls, it would appear. But don’t blame it on the so-called hipsters, as if they actually clamoured for this mural or have some amazing influence on Amtrak! If anything, blame the one-percent who are decorating their infrastructure according to the aesthetic of conspicuous consumption. Hipsters ride the Megabus, not Amtrak! The hipsters are serving the one percent in their restaurants and trying to get a gig on the latest version of Ted Mack! The hipsters I know are much more likely to be a good neighbor than Amtrak. Like the people who claim North Philly as their native land, they are likely to be reduced to finding a rare, affordable place to live, not merely decorate.

Hard to stay conscious

I think it is important for Jesus-followers to argue the philosophies and unconscious actions that dominate our days. What Christians bring to the process is a demand for reconciliation: with God and with others. Then we can get somewhere with justice.

Commenting on Jonny’s post, Marquita said: “The mural being made has a greater benefit to the city in hiding what should be its shameful failure to adequately provide jobs and educational for its citizens.” So true.

Nick said: “Reconciliation is a process, and there’s room in the process for some redistribution to go along with the love. Now, how do we get the so-called ‘job creators’ to even join the process?” Great thought.

Great question! I am a pretty optimistic guy and I think God is with me when I prophecy to the powers that be. But unbelievers are shameless and greedy (and plenty of believers are too!). My hope remains in the message of reconciliation delivered by authentic people of God acting in an alternative community. Otherwise Disney, Facebook and their inevitable successors are the future. There is another future already present in Christ; we know Him.