"Facebook-ing" Ourselves to Death

The Problems with Facebook

In 1985 Neil Postman* wrote the book Amusing Ourselves to Death, a critique of a culture that has been conditioned by television.  In the text, Postman insists that, in communication, form and matter are inseparable.  In other words, the content that is mediated is intrinsically linked to the medium of communication.  This metaphysical foundation serves as a starting point for his investigation of how the medium of television presents content to the consumer and thereby influences the consumer’s world view.  Postman points out that the television had become the primary method of dispersing information in virtually every facet of life, from politics to education to religion, etc.  Were it not that he passed away in 2003, it would be fascinating to hear Postman speak and apply his ideas to the social media on the internet.  Our culture has rapidly replaced the television as a source of information with blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Every observation made by Postman about the television can be extended to social computer media.

I am still hopeful that someday an author will come around and write the critique that I want to read about social media.  However, I have been waiting for this long enough that I am motivated to at least contribute my own thoughts.

My aim is not to discuss the overt misuses of Facebook.  These are obvious enough to most.  Instead, my aim is to disclose the subtle philosophical formation that can occur by using Facebook, particularly if we are not properly grounded in a Christian personalism.

The irony of promoting this article not only through a blog but also specifically through Facebook has not escaped me.  I find myself torn between seeing the intrinsic problems with the medium itself and the stark reality that far more people will read my critique than would otherwise if it is distributed through Facebook.  Call me a hypocrite - but the hypocrisy of using the medium I am criticizing as a method of distributing the criticism does not render that critique any less valid.

The way I see it there are four interrelated problems with Facebook.

The Problem of the Human Person

The Problem of Relationship

The Problem of Communication

The Problem of Romanticizing the Ordinary

1.  The Problem of the Human Person

Fundamental to a Christian personalism is that man is an incarnated soul: he discloses his inner mystery through his body.  To understand why Facebook cannot be an authentic presentation of the human person, we must distinguish between two ways in which something can stand in front of the soul.  The first is in such a way so as to disclose the reality of the soul.  This is the case of the body: standing “in front of” the soul, the body radiates the soul like a stain glassed window radiates sunlight.  The body acts as a veil over the mystery of the person and as such continually unveils that mystery.  Every action, every bodily expression, discloses the reality of the person.  This can occur precisely because the body-soul union is in no way dualistic.  If the body were a mere container for the soul, it would stand in front in a very different way: obscuring the reality of the soul.  This is how any medium of expression that is removed from bodily contact functions, including Facebook.  Moreover, the degree of obscuring varies directly with the degree to which contact is removed.  (Here we use the word “contact” in a general sense, one that does not necessarily involve physical touch.)  The profile presented on Facebook can never communicate the essence of the person.  Any resemblance that it bears to the soul of the author is ultimately coincidental and dependent on the interpretation imposed by the reader.  This is evidenced by the fact that one can never know for sure if the profile is created and maintained by the person whom it claims to be.  In contrast to this, bodily contact could never present such an illusion.

The danger in using a mechanism like Facebook is that frequent users will come to subtlety identify a particular human person with a profile that is being presented, and over time come to see the very definition of the human person as that which can be reduced and summarized in such a profile.

2.  The Problem of Relationship

The first problem leads naturally to the second.  While the body, as veil, is capable of drawing attention to the reality of the soul, revealing it in a mysterious manner, Facebook communication obscures the soul, and in doing so renders any relationship an illusion.

The concept of relationship is at the center a Christian personalism.  Man, as an imago Dei, bears in his soul the call to relationship; God, after all, is a Trinitarian relationship himself.  Because the computer screen does not open up an authentic space for disclosing the human person, it also does not open up a space for authentic relationship.  Relationship is the mutual disclosing of two persons, what philosophers call intersubjectivity.  While the collecting of “friends” can be a useful mechanism for maintaining contact information of other users, it is decidedly not authentic contact that is maintained.  Relationships, or “friends,” are treated as a collection.  The enormous numbers of “friends” that one holds in their Facebook account is an unnatural deviation from authentic friendship.  Aristotle spoke very highly of friendship, prized the friendship of virtue even above justice, and noted that true friends are necessarily small in number.

The danger in the frequent use of Facebook is a devolving of the entire concept of “friend.”  It is amazing to think just how far modernity has come form the Aristotelian formulation.  The problem is not in keeping the list of contacts, but in thinking that one actually is in contact with the “friend.”  It is telling that the creators of Facebook chose this word instead of other more appropriate ones like “contact”.  The word “friend” is more appealing to users because of the connotation of the word coupled with the natural need for this type of relationship - but those who are “friends” on Facebook have no obligation to act in a manner befitting of authentic friendship.  I have made the point in previous posts that vocabulary matters.  Through this misuse of vocabulary, people will come to identify the Facebook counterfeit for the real thing, rejecting the authentic version of friendship in favor of the deprived version.  In other words, people will come to re-define relationship in a way that a supported by the Facebook platform.  As a teacher, I can see the start of this already with young people.  They would rather spend twenty minutes texting or sending Facebook posts back and forth than to communicate in person or even over the phone.  I would say that in decades to come therapists will have a field day with this generation who has learned to communicate with one another through a computer screen, but the young people in need of this therapy will more than likely be seeking it through a “Therapist Facebook Fan Page.”

3.  The Problem of Communication

Much like the problem of the human person necessarily leads to the problem of relationship, so to does the latter lead to the problem of communication.  An interpersonal relationship necessarily involves communication, and the form that the communication takes will ultimately influence the quality of the relationship itself.  Pope John Paul II tirelessly proclaimed that man is made in the image and likeness of God precisely in his call to form a communio personarum (communion of persons).  Communication has everything to do with Communion, and proper communion can only be achieved in the presence of authentic vulnerability.  The very act of authentically communicating involves a surrendering the self to the other, and surrender of self always requires risk.  Conversely, risk leads to vulnerability, vulnerability leads to intimacy, and intimacy leads to communion.

Being physically present to one another opens up a space for vulnerability.  Part of this has to do with the fact that the communicator will receive immediate feedback about his words and actions and thereby be immediately responsible for them.  What’s more, this feedback is at the level of the person, so the speaker will be able to empathize with the sorrow, joy, anger, or pain that results from the communication.  The farther two people are removed from physical contact, the less risk that is involved in the communication, and hence the less likely it is that a proper space for vulnerability is opened up.  While I wouldn’t want to be in the business of predicting what worse ills our world may someday see, it seems to me that a mechanism like Facebook provides the maximum physical distance possible while still maintaining a semblance of “relationship.”  Thus, of all the forms that masquerade as authentic communication, something akin to Facebook is the least authentic.

Facebook has an additional problem in its method of communication.  Because the human fingers can only type so fast, communication through social media naturally becomes abbreviated, both in ideas and in syntax.  The problem here is two-fold.  First, if the written word has any hope of being an adequate means of communicating the mystery of the human person, it must be written in a manner that both accurately expresses an idea and does so in a manner that relies on the natural beauty of language to express the ineffable soul of the author.  This takes time, which is something not prized by a culture that has a need for immediate gratification, a need that has been conditioned by outlets such as Facebook.  (Postman would argue that this need for instant gratification was initially conditioned, on a widespread level, by the television.)  This is all a very complicated way of saying: the days of artful letter writing are being replaced with mechanical typing.*  It also seems to me that a culture that ceases to proclaim the importance of the word, written or spoken, by depriving it of its deserved eloquence will inevitably be a culture that ceases to understand Christianity, a faith that understands God as logos.

Second, the abruptness of the phrases typed in Facebook allows for communication without discernment.  It is too easy to type a letter or a message and hit “send” without reading it over, editing it, or properly discerning its appropriateness.  The plethora of grammatical errors that appear in Facebook posts and messages illustrate this lack of critical thinking.  This reactionary writing is a particular problem when the emotion of anger enters in.  The physical movement of banging fingers on a keyboard is quite conducive to expressing irrational anger.  Moreover, the anger and the speed of the typing form a dangerous cycle that culminates in the final “click” to send the undiscerned message.  On a broad spectrum, this sort of communication encourages spontaneous decision making, a concept antithetical to the life of prudence.

There is a peripheral issue regarding communication on Facebook.  While the platform provides tools for distinguishing between private and public conversations, it is not unusual to witness a public conversation whose content is private in nature.  This is a result of the three problems thus far discussed.  Facebook promotes such a deficient philosophy of the human person and interpersonal relationships that users seem incapable at times of discerning the difference between public and private content. 

4.  The Problem of Romanticizing the Ordinary

The final problem flows from the previous.  Postman’s insight is that the television allowed for a widespread communication of ideas to the masses.  In contrast to authentic communication between individual persons, the television uses the mechanism of “broadcasting”***, wherein the one-to-one communication becomes a one-to-many indoctrination.  Instead of two parties participating in a mutual subjection, each acting as giver and receiver in turn, broadcasting turns one party into the sole disseminator and the other into a passive recipient.  In Christian personalism, the only one sided relationship of gift-reception is that of God’s relationship to man.  In the world of broadcasting, the media has essentially taken on the role of God.

Postman’s ideas are important, because the generation that he cites as being formed by the broadcasting of ideas over the television waves is now the generation that is seeking the same paradigm on the internet.  Whereas the common man was once the one being broadcasted to, the internet provides him a cheap platform to become the broadcaster.  Facebook, in its ability to communicate to the multitude in short abrupt phrases, is the quintessential broadcasting tool for the common man.

The soundbite mechanism of the “status” in Facebook lends itself to romanticizing the ordinary.  Most instances of the “status” read something like, “Sitting on the couch with a good book and a glass of wine,” or “Went on a bike ride and had a picnic in a park.”  While these short soundbites communicate fact, they do so in a way that makes them sound like something from an idealized fairytale.  The irony is that our literature and cinema, the arenas that are supposed to present authentic myth, are being demythologized to a realism that presents far less of reality than do the mythological worlds of fairytales.  Perhaps the “status” phenomenon is a reaction to this demythologizing: people inherently feel the need for a perfect world beyond ours, so in the absence of its proper outlet (art), the Facebook status becomes the vehicle for the idyllic.  The problem is that Facebook does not seek to represent that which is beyond our world, but rather is a mechanism for portraying our world and our lives.  The danger is that, instead of seeing earth as inevitably heading towards heaven, we come to identify earth with heaven.

All of this leads to the problem of a severe narcissism****, and this is perhaps the worst of what Facebook offers to the degradation of human relationships.  We come to assume that our “friends” will be interested in our latest family pictures, what we ate on Friday night, what movie we are watching tomorrow, and a whole host of other trivial activities.  In a one-to-one conversation, the speaker would receive instant feedback (verbal or non-verbal) on how interesting his story is.  In allowing a completely one-sided communication, Facebook gives us the illusion that everything we do, even the trivial, is interesting.  Whereas the television plays the role of “God” in the one-sided gift-reception relationship of media/consumer, platforms like Facebook, in allowing the individual to do the broadcasting, have successfully allowed an individual man to play the role of God, and this is the very definition of narcissism.

(While I am focussing on Facebook, Twitter is much worse in the problems of abrupt communication and narcissistic tendencies, and it is hard for me to find any redeeming qualities of that particular social media.)

Conclusion

I will repeat what I said at the beginning.  The irony of using a blog and Facebook to promote this critique has not escaped me.  Whether I lose credibility or not in admitting that I don’t have an adequate response for why it is okay for me to distribute my online writing via Facebook, all the while insisting that its problems are intrinsic to the very structure, is for you to decide.  For my own part, I can only issue a profound caution for our society.  The move from one-to-one communication to one-to-many broadcasting is turning us into passive recipients of information (and in many cases “information” is substituted with entertainment), and thereby reducing the rational element of the human person.  It is precisely reason which separates us from beasts.  The move from communication to broadcasting takes a relationship that is most properly reserved for God-and-man and surrenders it to an impersonal “mass.”  (The solution, of course, is to supplant the mass with the Mass.)  If we, as a culture, continue to allow ourselves to be conditioned by broadcasting media, either by the elite corporations that seek to perpetuate their ideologies or by the common Facebook “friend” who seeks to turn ordinary experiences into an over-dramatized soundbite, we will inevitably reduce the most intimate forms of communications to mere emotive responses not properly integrated with our soul.  Insofar as our culture allows this, we will find ourselves dangerously close to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

* I am deeply indebted to Billy D. for his reference to Postman’s work.  His commentary on the first draft of this piece provided a much needed revision, and his thoughts have been incorporated throughout. 

** In the liturgy we say that the organ is more appropriate than the piano because of its possibility for sustained sound driven by moving air, whereas the piano is a percussive instrument.  There seems to be an ontological priority that the continuous enjoys over the discrete.  Perhaps it is because of the infinite divisibility of the continuous.  A similar principle governs handwriting.  The most expressive form is handwritten cursive.  The physical mechanics of producing this penmanship allow for the writer to better insert her infinite mystery into her words.  The first level of removal from cursive writing is printing.  While it is still being produced from the physical movement of the hands across the page, the motions are uncolored and non-fluid.  Less of the person is imbedded into a printed font than a cursive font, which is why printing is easier to forge than cursive.  On the other end of the spectrum is the mechanics of typing on a keyboard.  The motion is purely percussive and borderline violent, and it find itself almost completely incapable of disclosing the essence of the author, which is precisely why it can be forged with no difficulty at all.  Similar observations can be made for various musical styles (Gregorian chant playing the role of “continuous”) or various art forms.  I wrote about some of these themes here and here.  The basic metaphysical principle is: the further something gets from continuity, the less capable it is of expressing inherent mystery.

***  The term “broadcasting” is not Postman’s, but rather an insight of Billy D.

****  The charge of narcissism is credited to Jeff S.  My thanks goes out to him for proofing the draft and offering commentary that influenced the final product.