Boundaries with technology

Last week, I found myself in a discussion about facebook at a family gathering. I got these typical responses:

• facebook is changing modern discourse. It’s a little easier for our generation to abstain, but if someone in the younger generation isn’t on facebook, it will “ruin their lives.”
• “A few months ago, Janet, I would have said the same thing. I hear ya. I never thought I’d be on either.”
• Technology is just a tool.
• “Your head is in the sand.”

Each time I have one of these conversations — conversations in which, incidentally, I try very hard not to mow others down with my opinions, or suggest that they are losers if they don’t agree — I am surprised at two things. One is the unquestioning belief that facebook is an inevitable, necessary “given” of modern life. The other is the strength of my own feelings. I have a marked wariness of the whole facebook craze, and like most prophetic types, all the reasons are not instantly clear to me. It’s an intuitive sense. So I thought I’d try to use writing to begin untangling the knot.

I am not actually “against facebook.” While it doesn’t have any appeal for me either for local friendships, or as a way of tracking down people I’ve been out of touch with for many years, it would definitely become an option if life were to lead us far away from family and close friends. But it’s a myth that even then, it would be “necessary.” Good relationships were maintained over distance for centuries before facebook came along. Elizabeth Elliot speaks of how her mother would copy, collate, and distribute all the letters she received from her children among the family members, and how this kept them close. On a more personal note, my husband and I had a long-distance relationship for two years before we married, and to this day I’m convinced that having to write letters forced us to develop communication patterns we still enjoy. Relationships are a matter of priority, and while facebook may make exchanging media easier, and may be a nice supplement to real friendship, it isn’t a substitute for this.

Lately I’ve been thinking in terms of establishing boundaries in our relationship with technology. “Social media” involve two relationships: one is with the other people we try to connect with through that medium; the other is with the technological medium itself. We like to think of it as a “tool” that we use, inert and transparent. But it’s not actually either of these things. Technology is more like a genie in a bottle than an inert tool. It’s possible to be in control, but we should have a plan in mind to keep us there.

For instance, here are some things I observed during my brief flirtation with facebook. None of them would exist if it were merely a tool. All of them have to be contended with:

1. The time commitment. I am not speaking as someone unaware of the seductive pull of cyberspace. One day last week, when she learned that my husband would be taking my computer to work with him, my youngest ran gleefully down the hall calling to her sister, “Mommy’s not going to be on the computer all day!” This despite the fact that I try to get any actual writing on my blog done in the morning before they’re even awake, or after they’re in bed at night. I don’t need the giant sucking sound on my time that facebook would be.
2. It’s ubiquitous. It’s becoming impossible to be in a real social gathering with real people without someone mentioning facebook. How lame is that? It’s like two long-distance lovers getting together and spending their precious moments explicating the text of their last letter. I thought facebook was supposed to be the stand-in for all those busy schedules that won’t permit real-time getting together — not to become a third party when people actually DO get together.
3. It’s geared toward dependency. I disliked the ads in the sidebar, for instance. The only information facebook had was my age and gender, so the ads were targeted at those things. I especially hated the one that invited me to “See who’s been searching for you!” with various attractive male faces smiling. (What do guys get? Girls in bathing suits in the sidebar?) The instant I joined, facebook began probing delicately for insecurities: ads for weight loss products, exercise products, anti-aging cream, etc. My guess is, it’s because the more clicks they get, the more they can charge for advertising. How many emotional or relational weaknesses do they exploit in their users in the process? In real life, I can be your friend without anyone making a profit. (I’m not that kind of a girl… baddum-CHAH.)
4. This emphasis on dependency was reinforced (comically) when I deleted my account and facebook resisted me. “Are you sure you want to delete? Your friends will miss you!” the screen flashed in distress, then displayed my meager store of friends all smiling desperately. Why should facebook care? They’re losing that much more advertising revenue, I guess.
5. It feminizes relationship by reducing it to verbal exchange. As a girl, I’ve always felt an underlying jealousy about male gatherings. When guys get together, they do stuff: ski, hike, hunt, play basketball. When women get together, they drink tea and chat. facebook is all about chatting; only the fingers on the keyboard are physically active.
6. There’s no privacy. You can’t do anything on facebook without its being “announced.” It’s like a giant echo-chamber, which is an obvious barrier to relationship. (Beyond facebook, the illusion that you can put the details of your private life out there into cyberspace without some loss of freedom is an illusion.)
7. You have no control. I just wanted to be able to keep up with one person on facebook (see #1), but somehow I must have been “advertised” on other people’s walls (as others were advertised on mine), because I kept getting friend requests. You can’t tailor your visibility.
8. As a simulation of real relationship, it’s too convenient. There’s no risk, no interruptions, none of the conventions or obligations of real-time, face-to-face contact. As in the rest of life, you get what you pay for — and it’s not what our souls are really hungry for from other people.
9. It’s entirely verbal — no body language or facial expressions that add dimensionality and richness to real conversation.
10. Because it’s all written, it’s entirely linear. In a real discussion you can relate and think together on many levels at once. You can go down bunny trails. You discover related subjects that you didn’t know were there. None of the online options can do this — not even with the virtue of “threaded comments.”
11. Little depth.
12. The values championed online are cleverness and witty phraseology. Are these the values prized in a friendship?
13. You have to turn your back on the real people in the room with you to be on facebook. It’s rude. We all know it’s rude when we see someone yakking on a cell phone while their date sits bored across the table. The only difference with the internet is that it can be silent.
14. It’s ungrammatical — a proper name spelled with a small f. (…and you thought I was just making typos up till now!

That’s all I can remember at the moment.

Typically, someone might laugh me off as “too serious.” What can I say? I’ve been told all my life that I think too much, but it’s a central part of who I am to reflect and ponder. Some might even say it’s my strength or gift. There is a role for those who think “too much.”

All I’m trying to demonstrate with my list is that our knee-jerk reaction that technology is “just a tool,” and that we’re “in control,” is at best only partly true. I’ve already mentioned the dependency issues in #1 and #3 above. Now what about the fact that technology, in empowering the masses, actually only empowers the few? At the most basic level, any technology that presents us with the illusion of freedom and control is in fact so complex that it’s really only in the hands of the technologically elite. (I got a taste of this when my WordPress.com blog was shut down by WordPress. It turned out to be an accident, but when I read the fine print I discovered that “my” blog was actually WordPress’s blog.)

In a more general sense, even in offline life we are surrounded by devices that we do not understand and are helpless to fix if they go awry. Sometimes it’s actually due to “planned obsolescence,” whereby companies rake in profits. In other cases, we simply find ourselves buying “more and better” devices that advertising has convinced us we “need.” Applied to the “relational technology” realm, it’s not difficult to see that a similar craving for “more” is built-in.

Believe me, I feel it. It bears repeating: I’m not sitting in an ivory tower casting stones at the masses below. (I’m writing this online, after all!) I want friends as much as the next person, and when everyone’s on facebook I can feel the pull even if I hate it. Try to abstain, and you’ll see what I mean.

On the bright side, I’m beginning to doubt that it will last forever. The true “younger generation” — at least, my own children — do not seem to find the computer very appealing. They are bored by online games very quickly, and they resent the time the computer takes me “away.” They see it for what it is: a body sitting still and silent, fingers flying, eyes fixed on a small screen, brow tensed in thought. The real picture is quite a contrast to the common notion that we are entering a web of life.

If we live in a dysfunctional society, calculated non-participation is a way to preserve health. We Christians like to apply this to buying choices or which movies we watch or which clothes we wear, but we just seem to drift along unthinkingly when it comes to technology. We become militant about our taxes being raised or “socialist” public policy, but we willingly surrender our personal information, our time, and our relational needs to anonymous entities in cyberspace without blinking an eye. In targeting our relationships, “social networks” target a deeply spiritual aspect of who we are. It would be naive not to be wary or thoughtful about the illusory promises they make.

Recommended reading:

• Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves to Death (Neil Postman)
• The Abolition of Man (C.S. Lewis)
• “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” (Wendell Berry)