facebook, continued

I’m still thinking about my last post, the one about thinking in Facebook status updates, and it’s brought up new questions.  Mainly, is it possible to have meaningful connection with others on Facebook (or Twitter or Instagram or Foursquare or fill-in-the-blank)?   Is it possible to nurture a relationship and one’s sense of connectedness online?  One of the (many!) things that I hope our boys embrace throughout the course of their lives is meaningful relationships, and I, of course, want to do the same.   So I’ve been pondering technology and whether or not it’s conducive to life-giving connection with other people.   And I think the answer is a whole-hearted yes… with a caveat.

Let’s look first at the yes.  Yes, I do think it is possible and I can think of dozens of examples.  Here are just a few…

• As my friend, Donna, commented on the last post, Facebook has been a way for her to remain “in the know” with her friends despite the fact that she is often house-bound with a baby.   She can still connect with others, see what they are up to, encourage them and validate them, even if she seldom sees some of them during this particular season in her life.
• Our friend, Greg, known as “Gerg,” passed away a few years ago.  He was always a quiet guy, a little shy, and we didn’t think he had a lot of friends.  But when he died, a whole slew of online friends came out of the woodwork to share their grief and talk about how much he had meant to them.  It was really surprising to me.  I had no idea that he had connected with so many people online and that he was part of a virtual community of gamers and coders.  Hearing what these online friends said about him left me with no doubt that his connection with them had been real and deeply meaningful.
• When I was pregnant with Gryffin I was approached online by a fellow calligrapher looking for some tips and tricks of the trade.  An online friendship was born and the gift my new friend sent me after Gryff was born was one of the most meaningful ones I received.   There was such thought and warmth that went into the gift and we are still friends today, though we’ve never met in person.
• With friends and family far away, email and Facebook can serve as a way for us to stay mildly connected over the years and across the miles.  Is it the same as being part of one another’s day-to-day life?  No.  But maintaining those threads of connection, no matter how small, is a good thing, I think.   I recently spent an afternoon with a girlfriend from college.  We hadn’t seen each other in years but because we’ve maintained a small sense of connection online, it was easier to reconnect and jump back in.  It was easily one of the best conversations I’ve had in a really long time.
• This love flash mob that Jason and I joyfully participated in last week.  How good it felt to participate with an absolute army of people we’ve never met to make a difference for one woman and her baby.

I’m sure the rest of you have your own examples, your own stories about meaningful connection that you’ve discovered online and I’d enjoy hearing them.

Here’s the caveat, though.   I think the problem comes from all the un-meaningful-ness that you can find on Facebook and elsewhere online.  All the superfluous… stuff.  All the mindless mind-filler.   It’s numbing and time-consuming and does absolutely nothing to enrich or edify my life.  I think that’s why I sometimes feel lonely and pathetic on Facebook– because I’m not pursuing anything life-giving or beautiful or meaningful.  I’m just passing the time, dulling my senses, and taking up time that would be so much better spent elsewhere or in other ways.    It DOES go back to being a good steward of the present.   I’m multi-tasking instead of uni-tasking, looking at my phone when I should be looking at Jason across the table, I’m pinning recipes instead of preparing a meal with the boys, and compulsively checking email all the day long instead of sitting down to write the one email to a friend that might actually be worth writing.    And that’s what’s depressing and lonely.

This technology thing is a fairly new phenomenon and it’s amazing and a whole lot of fun sometimes, but we haven’t had generations blazing the trail before us so that we can learn from their foibles and pitfalls.  I’d like to harness all the goodness that the internet and technology have to offer and let the other stuff, the bland and ultimately boring things that fight hard for my attention, fall by the wayside.  It’s really not that hard to see which things are important and worth my time and which things aren’t.  The hard part is choosing what’s important, don’t you think?  I’ve been asking Gryffin and Isaiah lately if they are “making good choices” and I think maybe I could stand to ask myself the same question.   Am I choosing real, life-giving, expanding relationships and meaningful connections, online or otherwise, or am I just wasting more and more of my time doing things that don’t really matter?