I recently went through my list of Facebook “friends” and changed about 900 of the 1000 or so into “acquaintances,” which — in theory — will keep all but the most important of their posts or activities from showing up in my news feed. I also went through and “unliked” nearly all of the hundreds of pages/causes that populate my feed with their updates (keeping but a small few that met criteria which I may discuss later).
This is the half-measure that I am going to try out in lieu of abandoning Facebook altogether. I’m not sure if it will work.
Here are some initial thoughts and reactions:
There’s Only So Much of Me to Go Around
The experience of the change immediately reinforced what I had begun to realize about Facebook specifically, as well as my life in general. Simply, I have a very finite amount mental/emotional/spiritual space, and it becomes cluttered more quickly than I ever expect.
Tools like Facebook give us the illusion, since we are able to make and manage more social connections, that our capacity to engage them (i.e., to care about them) has increased. It hasn’t.
Furthermore, we think that we can introduce, through use of tools like Facebook, thousands upon thousands of new connections, new bits of information, new stimuli and, yet, still selectively pay attention to, care about, respond to only those that are important — without any loss or negative impact. (It is not I, but those other fools that are affected by advertising.)
I have been noticing this in a variety of areas of my life, mostly in ways connected with technology. To use Covey’s classic imagery, we readily expand our sphere of concern far beyond our sphere of influence, which then contracts as a result. We are concerned about vastly more and, thus, concerned about each individual matter far less, and all the while, our ability and inclination to do much of anything about anything dwindles.
I tended to think that having a Facebook app on my phone, which is connected to 1000s of people and advertisers at all times, doesn’t affect me as long as I only open the app an appropriate amount of times throughout the day for an appropriate duration of time. I tended to think that having a streaming music service doesn’t negatively affect me or change how I think about or value music, as long as I don’t play it too much or play the wrong type of music.
I’m just not so sure about this any more. Inevitably, I find that Facebook and those thousands of connections have changed how I think, feel, react, and regard. Even when I close the browser or turn off the app, spiritually and emotionally the clutter remains.
I am more and more experiencing the truth of McLuhan’s insight: despite what we think, the medium is perhaps more potent than the message it mediates.
Nixing the Entertainment Fix
As said, I had played around with the idea of these and even more drastic measures regarding Facebook for a while. What I underestimated was how immediate and profound were the subjective effects of cutting a list of 1000 people down to 100 with whom I am making a conscious choice to engage.
Instantly, the news feed is no longer a news feed. It is no longer a diversion that I can turn to for an entertainment fix. Suddenly it represents actions, needs, responsibilities, things that I do or don’t but ought to care about.
It is not that those 100 people (close friends, family members, etc) weren’t there before. They were there, but they were diluted in a sea of irrelevance presenting itself as news/content/entertainment to be consumed.
Removing the Soap Opera Effect
Now, I realize the tendency of the newsfeed of this supposed “social network” to simply become, for one, a source of diversion, of a quick entertainment fix, and also leads one to begin seeing all the people represented therein as the same. It starts with those who really are obscure to one’s concern (the celebrity stories, the friends of friends from whom one can never remember accepting a friend request, etc.). Then, it moves inward to those one is acquainted with but has no ongoing involvement. Finally, it proceeds to even those close family and friends that one would/should (if one could) care about/love/pursue/engage with for their own sake.
They all become simply content for my newsfeed — the characters that populate the soap opera that is always playing in an open browser tab and in the app on my phone.
Frog in the Pot
We know this. All these things are cliche, passé. We know, and we resolve to not be affected. But we are, and we persist! Thus, we must question whether we really knew or understood the implications of the situation in the first place.
As my father is so fond of referencing, this is truly a “frog in the pot” scenario. We continually look around and observe the pot, the water, and the increasing temperature, but insist that the heat is manageable now, and we’ll certainly jump out if it becomes otherwise. But, the whole point is precisely that from within the pot one has the worst vantage point on both the current and future state of affairs.
Good Servant, Bad Master
Of course, even what I have recently done has been but a half-measure. I am still, for now, on Facebook.There is a case to be made for such measures in such cases though.
Whether or not I perfectly interpreted the work or its implications, one of my takeaways from Neil Postman’s eye-opening book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology was the value in a seemingly arbitrarily holding oneself back from the “cutting edge” when it came to technology. It is not that there is some ultimately “right” or “safe” level of technology for a human person to inhabit (computers, pen and pencil, stone tablets, the spoken word). But if the concern is whether or not I am able to evaluate and manage the influence of technology on myself and my family, there is something to be said for intentionally staying behind the curve.
One primary danger of technology — any technology — is simply its initial novelty and the fascination that it engenders in a subject. At its introduction, a technology is a slippery thing to grasp. The new user and, even more so, the technology’s creator are in precisely the worst vantage point for evaluating the net usefulness of a technology and its effects on our way of viewing the world and other people, one’s information and values.
Thus, there is good reason to consider holding back, enforcing a certain distance from the “cutting edge,” using technologies that are now boring, or intentionally limiting or truncating the functionality of novel ones, however arbitrary and counter-productive such limitations might seem.
It has been said that technology makes a good servant, but a bad master. What we underestimate is how easily the former can shift to become the latter and how subtle the change can be.
“I understand the technologies I am using and I would know if I am being unduly influenced or changed by them,” says the frog swimming in an already-quite-warm stew.
Gaining Perspective
So this is my experiment with Facebook for now. It may be temporary, it may be a half-measure, it may not work. But I am reaching for perspective and space to evaluate such things. If greater cuts must be made, then so be it.
On a separate but not entirely unrelated note, you should check out Marc Barnes’ essay on “Modesty and Act” which explores what it means to be a subject, and how one’s ability to act/choose is affected by the world. It is a fascinating piece that digs into this question of our perception vs. the reality of whether (and to what degree) we are influenced by fashions, technology, and the opinions of others.
My wife and I love the CS Lewis Space Trilogy — and Archbishop Chaput does, too!
There are a lot of ways that we are called to endure injustice. Some of them we are more comfortable with than others.
One of them is how we conduct ourselves in discussion/debate with those we disagree. Principled people of any sort face the challenge today of a public that is, at large, irrational, illogical, prone to faction and lots of yelling. Catholics have the additional challenge of believing and proclaiming very unpopular Truths (perennially as well as currently).
The fact remains, if our reason for discussing/debating is something beyond ourselves – Truth, justice, the souls of the people involved vs our pride or self-satisfaction – then the greater part of discussion/debate, especially today, is charity, patience, and the willingness to suffer injustice. We must be willing to suffer injustice and misunderstanding rather than resort to angry shouting or other means (or memes) that defeat our purposes (and are not justified by them).
What does this look like in practice? Sometimes it means ostensibly letting other people “win” or get the upper hand. It means letting irrational, illogical, puerile, immature, and unfair comments roll off one’s back. It sometimes means sacrificing the argument to win the soul (theirs as well as ours).
We have to continually be realistic about our situation: 1) our beliefs are unpopular and misunderstood, 2) our culture is insane, and 3) the people we are talking to have been heavily influenced by said insanity (as have we). So we have to expect that anyone we talk to comes to the table with a bevy of misunderstandings, assumptions and prejudices about us and our ideas. Their heads are buzzing with witty “gotchas” and “slogans” that only apply to straw caricatures of us.
And you know what? The reverse is almost always true as well.
With all this in mind, we have to be ready to enter a discussion “wise as serpents, simple as lambs” (Matthew 10:6). We need to be bold and prepared, but ready to content ourselves with asking and listening when “telling” isn’t serving the end goal (even if it is making us feel good). We have to be ready to be misunderstood and expect to misunderstand (and patiently attend to the latter first). When the arguments of our opponents make no logical sense, we must help them to clarify and express them better – this is often a prerequisite for them to be able to see that there is a problem! We must be courageous, yes, but nevertheless patient and charitable at all times.
So be ready to “die to self” a bit when discussing/debating with other people. Scratch that. Don’t be “ready”. Expect to die to self. In fact, if your discussion, debate, and evangelization don’t involve “picking up your cross” in some way, you are probably doing it wrong.
Terri Carrol, a sociology professor at Bowling Green and the co-director of the National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR), has a lot of interesting information to share in the article “State of the American Family” that was recently published in BGSU Magazine. But what goes unsaid in fact speaks far louder. Behind the litany of sociological observations, one gets the sense that Carrol and the researchers at the NCFMR think that the movement away from the traditional family ideal is a positive and perhaps liberating change.
“Pervasive,” “15 year aberration,” and a “nostalgic myth” are a few of the terms used to describe traditional families as exemplified in the 1950s show Leave it to Beaver. While the Cleaver family in the 1950s sitcom was certainly unique to the time period in many ways, a more traditional family model seems to be guilty by association. Far more “pervasive,” though hardly aberrant, is the primordial model of the human family consisting of a monogamous mother and father and their children — no nostalgia or myth-making necessary. After we read that only 15% of people now belong to such traditional families, Dr. Susan Brown (another BGSU sociology professor) is quoted as saying, “But the era represented by ‘Leave it to Beaver’ is long gone, reflecting rapid social, cultural, and economic changes. We have more options today. There is no longer one, uniform model of family life.” Here again the language carries an amount of implicit interpretation of the data. Changes to the normal structure of the family are called simply “options” and the existence of such options implies, in Brown’s estimation, that any prior model of family is losing its relevance.
The crucial question not being asked is this: Because there is a movement away from the traditional family structure, does that mean there ought to be? Does the fact that many modern families increasingly fail to fit into more traditional models imply that such a failure is in fact a success? We realize of course that these days, any and all “change” is something we are expected be “hopeful” about, but does that hold true for the changes observed by researchers at the NCFMR?
We can and must reflect on where our families are now (as has been done by the NCFMR) but we cannot interpret what that means without some sense of where families should be. We can say where we are on the map, but we cannot say our location is good or bad unless we know where we are going. In the same way, we cannot begin talking about the “state of the American family” without putting thought to what a family truly is — what it ought and ought not be.
Without any sort of ideal of what the family should be, we cannot say (or imply) with any weight whether or not the current state (or states) of the family is better or worse off. However, this seldom deters us from putting blind faith in “progress.” It is a purely modern prejudice to assume that we are better off now than in the past, simply because the past is the past. We speak so often of “progress” though we have no idea where we are progressing to! Brown has told us that we have many new “options” for what the family might be, but she has not told us whether or not any of these options are good options (at least not explicitly). If we want to be able to make any qualitative statements about the “state of the family,” then we must have some criteria or ideals by which to evaluate.
We surely can agree about some things that make a family healthy and good, but we rarely find it convenient to follow such intuitions to their conclusions. We all intuit the value of commitment. For example, commitment of fathers and mothers to each other and to their children has always clearly been regarded as a good thing. Any first or second-hand experience of divorce or separation can show us that commitment belongs to the ideal family. We like families that last. We also don’t like adultery. Anyone who has been “cheated on” can say that is not a good thing. Such things may be “options,” but are they not options to be avoided?
Families should ensure the welfare of children. In fact ensuring the wellbeing of the next generation is one of the primary purposes of family. Thus we have another easy ideal with which to question the health of the modern family: does it care for children? Does it put their needs, their rights, and their welfare first? What type of family structure or parental arrangement is best for children?
Unless evidence can show that the traditional “option” of a mother and a father in a committed monogamous relationship is not ideal, why do we so hastily dilute the meaning of the word “family” to include any and every new set of circumstances? Brown asserts the validity of these options with no justification other than the fact that they are new, available, and have been occurring in society.
Certainly, the data paints a picture of fragmentation and flux regarding family structures. We would imagine that even those 15% of families that resemble what is considered “traditional” have more than their fair share of dysfunction. Fathers and mothers have left their children and spouses, most families are divorced or broken in one way or another, and young parents are frequently underprepared for the necessary responsibility and commitment. We heartily affirm the valiant efforts of loving individuals who attempt to pick up the pieces of such unfortunate circumstances, but we do them no good by attempting to re-label their circumstances as merely “new options”.
The fact that there is infidelity in many marriages says nothing against the goodness or possibility of marital fidelity. The fact that many children grow up without a mother or a father does not mean that mothers and fathers are not the ideal parents for a child. The fact that separation, division, irresponsibility, betrayal, and selfishness break up so many families and cheat so many children out of a normal life does not mean that we should throw up our hands and calls such circumstances “options”. In fact, we must realize that the ideals of what a family could and should be are what allow us to affirm our best efforts in imperfect situations. We say such things as “he is like a father to me” or “they were the only family I ever knew” precisely because we recognize the heroic love and sacrifices that often occur in less-than-ideal situations. Either there is such a thing as an ideal family, and loving individuals in less-than-ideal situations strive to provide something like it, or there is no such thing as an ideal family, and all of our judgments, opinions, praise, criticisms, and “family and marriage research” are meaningless.
The data in the “State of the American Family” is interesting and certainly has its place in the public discourse; it tells us where we are currently at and clues us in to how we got here. However, even Dr. Wendy Manning recognizes that there is something of importance intuited in the primordial family relationship:
Everyone has a family. As the primary organizational group in our society, people are aware that healthy families are key to a healthy society. People sense intuitively that families are evolving and, therefore, are interested in our findings.
Dr. Manning, we couldn’t agree more: everyone has a family, healthy families are key to healthy societies, and the state of the family is drastically changing. The first two observations, if taken seriously, should give us great pause in light of the third.
We are in need of frank, courageous, and honest consideration of the traditional, primordial model of the human family which the researchers at the NCFMR so readily marginalize. Let us think carefully on the nature and purpose of family, not in order to condemn best efforts of loving individuals in tough situations, but in order that we may plot a course of true progress, even if it means retracing our steps.
This article was written by BGSU Alumni, Rob Hohler and JonMarc Grodi in response to “State of the American Family” published in the BGSU Magazine.