{"id":404,"date":"2011-09-09T05:32:03","date_gmt":"2011-09-09T09:32:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=404"},"modified":"2011-09-09T07:33:35","modified_gmt":"2011-09-09T11:33:35","slug":"why-i-went-on-and-then-off-and-then-on-and-then-off-of-facebook-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=404","title":{"rendered":"Why I went ON and then OFF and then ON and then OFF of Facebook"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Empires rarely learn in time because power tends to dull people’s capacity for critical self-reflection.<\/p>\n

– Robert Jensen (School of Journalism, University of Texas),\u00a0“The Imperial Delusions of the United States<\/a>,”\u00a0Al Jazeera<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

The royal consciousness with its program of achievable satiation has redefined our notions of humanness\u2026It has created a subjective consciousness concerned only with self-satisfaction\u2026It has so enthroned the present that a promised future, delayed but certain, is unthinkable.<\/p>\n

– Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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In the busy, teeming crowd, which as community is both too much and too little, man becomes weary of society, but the cure is not in making the discovery that God’s thought was incorrect. \u00a0No, the cure is precisely to learn all over again the most important thing, to understand oneself in one’s longing for community.<\/p>\n

– S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard, Works of Love<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I am writing this on S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard\u2019s feast day in the calendar of the Episcopal Church.\u00a0 He died childless, having written in the language of an obscure little country.\u00a0 He could\u2019ve written in German, but he wrote in Danish. \u00a0He chose to write locally, for the people he both loathed and loved.\u00a0 His neighbors drove him crazy, for their provincial views and their lack of appreciation of truly real, reflective life.\u00a0 But they were also his neighbors, his kin, and he wanted to write for their confusion and edification.<\/p>\n

I am also writing this the week that everyone and their cat is discussing 9\/11.\u00a0 I wrote a little piece right after that day for this volume<\/a>,\u00a0and I think I still stand by what I wrote there.\u00a0 Basically, I told the story of how Rachel lost her gift of speech right after hearing about the disaster.\u00a0 We were at Kanuga Conference Center, in the beautiful North Carolina hills, and she was listening too closely to the radio in the little library there.\u00a0 The adults around her weren\u2019t realizing that she was listening, but she was.\u00a0 And my very verbal little girl turned into a confused, scrambled toddler.\u00a0 She reverted back to a kind of baby talk that wasn\u2019t even hers as a baby.\u00a0 She lost the gift of speech.\u00a0 She was speechless.\u00a0 And I suggested, in that little piece, that the proper stance before this horror may indeed be incapacitated speech.\u00a0 Silence.<\/p>\n

I went on Facebook initially as \u201cProfessor Amy Laura Hall\u201d at the suggestion of an undergraduate who was taking my course in the Genomic Revolution Focus Program.\u00a0 If memory serves, Danny himself went off Facebook for a while, after setting up my account, to see what it felt like to be off.\u00a0 But he suggested I use FB to engage students in activism and critical thinking.\u00a0 He thought I could use it better as a tool for teaching radical politics than the usual Blackboard offerings at Duke.\u00a0 So, I tried.\u00a0 And it seemed to work, in some ways.\u00a0 Students were reading articles that don\u2019t come off the usual CNN track, and arguing about them online.\u00a0 They were making connections across disciplines, generations, and faith commitments and non-commitments.\u00a0 It was exciting, exhilarating even, to watch people from many different parts of my life struggle with one another about basic questions of civic engagement.<\/p>\n

But then things just went off-kilter.\u00a0 I was trying to link broader political matters back to my own institution, which led to hurt feelings, and worse.\u00a0 Things at work were so busy, and people were so booked with their own efforts, that side-notes and quick links stood in for real, embodied, communal conversation.\u00a0 To boot, there were too many conversations going on to keep track.\u00a0 People in one venue felt left out and confused by conversations going on in another venue.\u00a0 I was unable to host well a virtual community.<\/p>\n

After about 18 months off, I went back on, inspired by this piece from On the Media<\/a> about how people working across continents could help free and reshape a conversation that had become mired in the usual blah blah blah of talking heads on the few, designated channels of information.<\/p>\n

It seemed worth a try – to see whether I could get it right this time.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t.\u00a0 The same problems emerged, this time with a family disaster in the mix.\u00a0 Going through divorce online was a bad idea.\u00a0 I wanted to encourage women and men who have gone through the mess of a divorce to be brave and honest about the pain and confusion, but, in the words of one friend, I had a tendency to \u201cfillet myself\u201d and offer the most vulnerable feelings there for the world to read.\u00a0 To use another image, I was sending out not just messages in bottles, but bottle rockets, missing friends and former students so much that I turned repeatedly to Facebook for verification that there was a community of friends out there praying and cheering for the \u201cGreen Street Girls,\u201d as I called my newly configured little family. \u00a0It was far too easy for me (and maybe for others) to use the screen as an intermediary. \u00a0In retrospect, I needed real, live people to bring us casseroles and hugs, to knock on my door to talk to the real, live me. \u00a0But, it turns out, that kind of incarnate care\u00a0is<\/strong><\/em> hard directly to ask for, and even harder to receive. \u00a0(See also: Problema III of Fear and Trembling<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

In the end, the mix of political and personal on Facebook just didn\u2019t work, and so I went off, opting for this blog.<\/p>\n

Can social media link people across the barriers of our usual, Fox versus MSNBC divisions?\u00a0 Can Facebook break down walls that divide what we usually read and who we usually attend to?\u00a0 Maybe.\u00a0 But it tends too often to serve as a substitute for real, incarnate, embodied time with one another.\u00a0 The staff who wrote the Robin Hood series that helped to reshape reality for their listeners (see link above) had to work textually rather than communally because of the Red baiting, blacklisting practices of that time.\u00a0 We aren\u2019t under quite such strictures.\u00a0 And it seems that social media works best when it facilitates real events in real time and real space for us to attend to one another \u2013 to see one another face to face and look at the real presence of God\u2019s beautiful universe written in another person\u2019s eyes.\u00a0 This is the best way to organize politically, and to find true \u201cfriends.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, I am off Facebook again, and I am meeting more people at the Durham\u2019s Farmer\u2019s Market and at yoga class and, yes, even while hula hooping at Motorco<\/a>.\u00a0 True to form, I talk to just about everyone about the crazy politics going on in the state and about community organizing in Durham, and I dare bring up God or even Jesus periodically to those who have multiple piercings and are headed for a very kinky fetish party (real example) at the heart of hipster Durham.<\/p>\n

I am not going to try to type something meaningful about 9\/11.\u00a0 Read the linked Al Jazeera article for the best commentary I have seen to date.\u00a0 But I will say on this Feast Day of Saint Kierkegaard that using the gift of speech for and with one\u2019s real neighbors seems the best use of our God-given, intricate minds.\u00a0 We can work the multi-lingual, dis-embodied spaces of the internet for fun, but the real labor of love is to try to speak the language of incarnate love with the people who live closest to us, knocking on doors and introducing ourselves to people who watch a show we find abhorrent or play a video game we really wish we didn\u2019t know exists.<\/p>\n

\n

We should take time on 9\/11 to remember the nearly 3,000 victims who died that day. But as responsible citizens, we also should face a harsh reality. While the terrorism of fanatical individuals and groups is a serious threat, much greater damage has been done by our nation-state caught up in its own fanatical notions of imperial greatness.<\/p>\n

– Robert Jensen (same article as above)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I agree with my Texan compatriot here that we have become a people willing either to countenance or ignore what is happening in the wider world of torture and warfare (see link<\/a>\u00a0to TAMCAT notes\/resources).\u00a0 We need all hands on deck and all media in the mix to wake us all up to what is being done in our name around the globe.\u00a0 And, in this little missive on this little screen, I would suggest that the words best spoken will be those uttered face to face, across an awkward chasm of existence, rather than those typed on a screen.\u00a0 Risk the strange grace that comes from such an encounter, even if it means a bemused stare or a true misunderstanding.\u00a0 To bring my beloved Kierkegaard back in, risk loving the neighbor close at hand, even if this is the hardest work of all.\u00a0 Facebook can\u2019t heal the spiritual brokenness that Jensen speaks about.\u00a0 It is a useful tool, but only if part of a smaller, more intricate web of human relationships built over time and over slowly sipped coffee.<\/p>\n

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Empires rarely learn in time because power tends to dull people’s capacity for critical self-reflection. – Robert Jensen (School of Journalism, University of Texas),\u00a0“The Imperial Delusions of the United States,”\u00a0Al Jazeera The royal consciousness with its program of achievable satiation has redefined our notions of humanness\u2026It has created a subjective consciousness concerned only with self-satisfaction\u2026It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,11,10,8],"tags":[17,18,19],"class_list":["post-404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-durham","category-ethics","category-organizing","tag-facebook","tag-september-11","tag-soren-kierkegaard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7EotM-6w","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=404"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":455,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404\/revisions\/455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}