The Irrelevance of Relevance

This last month, I passed the thousand blog post mark.  At an average of three hundred or so words per blog, that's a whole bunch of writing.  It's not quite the 560,000 words of War and Peace yet, but more than halfway there.

This blogging thing is a good discipline to have.  If you want to be a writer, then you have to 1) read and 2) write.  Don't think about writing, or consider writing, or talk about writing.  Write.  Do it whenever you have time.  Do it whenever you have even the tiniest flash of inspiration.  Just write.

Realizing that I've got over a thousand discrete thoughts that I've publicly shared, I've lately begun going back through my archives and reposting the ones that are still relevant through my #twitter account.  Way I figure it, I've amassed so many posts that I'm like the NSEA Protector, hurling itself through cyberspace towing a veritable minefield of content.  

Those with Galaxy Quest ears, let them hear.

That exercise--of going back over the writing of the last five years, and picking out what still has meaning--has been fascinating.

Why?  Not because I'm so amazing.  Nope.  It's because so much of what I've written in the last five years is now pretty much meaningless.  About one in three of the blog posts still have purchase, or seem worth re-reading.  Those fall into a couple of categories.  

Stories, where I have used this blog to post them, are still solid.  Narratives really do have staying power.  Slice of life vignettes, those brief impressions of existence that capture the poignancy of human life?  Those are still worth reading, because life is still life.  Big picture thinking, posts that talk about what it means to be faithful or alive?  Still good.

But there are so many posts that are a reaction to some event or online kerfuffle, that weigh in on the issue du jour.  They were relevant then.  They are, now, utterly meaningless.

That got me to wondering about the difference between being reactive and being creative, and of the strange irrelevance of relevance.

There is a powerful tendency, in this social media era, to want to leap onto whatever #hashtag is trending right now.  It's part of our culture of fevered, grasping self-promotion.  You have to weigh in, to have your say, to ride that wave of chatter to acclaim like you're surfing a huge roller of relevance.

Only then the next wave comes in.  And the next one.  And the one after that.

It's one advantage of having this medium, writ into the virtual world like the living memory of our story.

At some point it dawns on us, if we bother to sift through the story of our lives, that so much of what we think is pressing, vital, and urgent is not that at all.

Meaningless, meaningless, as Ecclesiastes might say.

Pope Francis, Social Media, and Identity

A recent online article in the hippity-happenin' Christian magazine Relevant celebrated an entire year of Papal Tweeting, as we move into year two of our collective celebrity Pope crush.

Or perhaps that should be #popecrush.

Yeah, I think a #hashtag is in order here.

What struck me in reading the long list of tweets offered up by Pope Francis over the last year were two things.  First, how simple, kind and gracious they all were.  This is how Christianity should sound.  It just is.

Second, how utterly different the tone of those tweets were than the tweets to be found on Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio's twitter feed just one year ago, back when he was George and not Frank.

Twelve months ago, I'd followed the churning social media frenzy around the selection of the new pope.  It was fascinating, particularly watching the reactions on the hyper-instant neural feed that twitter provides.

When the smoke finally puffed out of that little chimney, and the name was announced, I did the natural thing in a social media era.  I went to this new pope's twitter feed, to see what he was sharing with the world.  Who is this guy?  What does he have to say?

I found Cardinal Bergoglio's verified Twitter feed, and scanned back for a year.  I blanched, and sitting in my church office, I said to myself, "Lord have mercy, this guy is going to be the Pope?  God help us."

If what we say represents what matters to us, what mattered to Cardinal Bergoglio was stopping gays and lesbians from adopting children in Argentina.  The feed was almost monomaniacal on the subject.

That was his primary issue as a Cardinal, his defining contribution to the broader conversation on faith.  It was pretty consistent, shrill, and more than just a little bit horrible, to the point where I received the news of his ascension to the Papacy with slightly clenched teeth.

Reserve judgement, I said, a year ago.  Tempting as it was, I would not allow myself to believe that these cruel, Pharisaic tweets represented the wholeness of this person.  Let him prove that he knows what is important.  Do not yield to the desire to attack now.  Give him a chance.

Because I know that social media can do strange things to our identities as persons.  To make a name for ourselves, we need to claim a platform.  We become something other than the complex being we are.  We seek conflict, and places where we can make a name for ourselves.  We can take a stand that makes us stand out, shouting louder and louder that we are signal, dammit, not noise.

It can cause us to surface our darkness, to linger in places of conflict and brokenness, to deepen wounds and hurts.  Social media does not need to be that thing.  But we have made it so.

I'm glad, over the last year, that Pope Francis has proven that he gets that there is a better way.

That year should remind us, thems of us who spend time on social media, to listen to our tone, and know that it matters.

Public Shaming and Social Media

It's surfaced a few times on my social media feeds in the last week.  Public Shaming, it's called, a progressive/lefty social media site (on tumblr, in this instance) that serves one purpose.

That purpose: to highlight racist/ignorant comments on social media, and then turn the ire of those who are outraged at such comments against the individual in question.  You're invited to google it...but it's a wee bit profane.  Well, actually, it swears like a sailor with Turettes.  Just so's ya know.

It was active around the Asiana airlines crash, publicly humiliating those insensitive enough to make that an opportunity for jokes about race.  And then I saw it again today, as it called out a half-dozen or so twitter users who made racist and ignorant assumptions about singer Marc Anthony as he sang at a baseball game.

The folks tweeting were...well...not bright, and not pleasant.  Being of Latino heritage and fluent in Spanish doth not make a person 1) Mexican or 2) Not American.   And what they posted, without exception, was shameful.  But as this site and others like it get more purchase, I found myself wondering what reaction it was stirring out there.

What does public humiliation look like in the social media era?   I went to the twitter feed of one @G_Lewis19 to find out.  He'd tweeted the following bit of nastiness to our collective consciousness:

"Why is some Spanish [fornicate] singing God Bless America at the All Star Game? That's just wrong"

Contemptible, without question.  And...well...stupid.  And racist.  All of those things.  So I searched for his account.

There, I observed the reaction, fueled by the shaming site.

Hundreds of responses, pages and pages of them.  I scrolled down for a while.

Some were measured.  Most were rather less so.  A sample, redacted as needed:

"Get educated dumb [fornicate]!" 
"You dumb white trash [fornicate]!!!!"  
"I hate dumb[fornicates] that talk [excrement] about r culture...Glewis beware!"  
"you ugly [fornicating] short white trash. He's American you dumb [fornicate.]" 
"[Fornicate] your apologies you said there is no coming back from being scum you hateful [genitalia]..." 
"so ur the moron who think latins can sing an american song guess what fagot puertorricans are as americans as anyone else."

And so on, and so forth. Hundreds of these.  From the comments, it was clear that the offender had attempted an apology, and then stopped as the tide of hatred continued, and then fled.  The account itself is no longer accessible, at least as of this writing.

Other accounts targeted for racist comments were still up, with various reactions.  One appeared to be an attention troll, the sort of web denizen who thrives on that sort of thing, and was continuing to blissfully spew out nastiness in a sea of vitriolic response.  But most shut down.

And I wonder...just what does this help, precisely?  What does using media as a lens to bring the outrage of hundreds or thousands onto an individual actually do?  Sure, there are ignorant people out there.  But connecting them with people who are filled with hatred for their stupidity seems unlikely to create ground for reconciliation or understanding.

Hatred has, in the long and blighted history of our species, never managed to do much of anything but engender more hatred.  And shaming, humiliation, and verbal abuse of a complete stranger...no matter how much of an idiot/moron/knuckledragger they may in actuality be...also doesn't tend to improve things.

It's not particularly good for changing the blighted spirit of a racist, any more than beating a bad dog makes them a better dog.

But it's also not good for those who feel that surge of insta-media outrage and umbrage, vent at a stranger, and then move on through their day.   It stirs a sense of agitation that more likely than not does not actually mirror their reality.  It shifts and shapes us into holding an adversarial understanding of being.

And that seems like the last thing we need in our culture.  That, we already have aplenty.

Pope Twitter the First

Yesterday was satisfyingly busy.  Meeting followed conversation followed meeting, with working and thinking and sermon-cogitation woven in and around all of it.

And in the thick of it all, Twitter hummed away behind one tab of my browser.  My wanderings through the twitterness have continued over this month, and yesterday, I found myself experiencing yet another world event through this peculiar medium.

It really is like being in a scene from the Incredible Journey, sitting there in your tiny little nanosub and watching the neurons in the vast cortex around you light up and flash and blort out transmitters around you.

No, wait, Incredible Journey was the one with the dogs.  Um...what's that film again...um...you know, the futuristic one with Raquel Welch playing the Helpless-Eye-Candy-"Girl"-Who-Will-Eventually-Need-Rescuing?  Um.  Amazing...um...something.  No, not that one.  Oh, right.  The Fantastic Voyage.

As there are many, many co-religionists populating my corner of the global brain, yesterday was an endless blorting yarp of Papal tweets.  Some were earnest prayer-tweets from Catholics.  Many were goofy metacommentary, as the addled popcorn brain of our social macroorganism nattered on about smokestacks, cannabis, and some random seagull.

It trended and trended hard, to the point where even tweeting teens who use Twitter to let the world know about their every self-absorbed moment noticed.  "What the [Freak] is all this [flipping] Pope [poop]?  OMG I dunt care abt disss [excrement]!!! #whocares"

When the selection came, though, what my Twitter feed almost instantaneously let me know was the name of the Pope, the name he had chosen, and that as a Cardinal he had his very own Twitter account.  Surely, surely that's a first.

What is this human being like, I wondered.  Traditional media outlets were talking Jesuit, and waxing on about St. Francis of Assisi, and talking about "care for the poor," and "spartan lifestyle."  It sounded promising.

But Twitter means he'll be talking about himself and what was important to him, so of course, I clicked and went there.  I'll admit that Twitter's not the very best medium for really knowing someone, but you can get a hint.  That I'm a slightly goofy pastor who's into quantum physics and theology would become quickly apparent, for example.

What I found were two tweets about his becoming Pope, and then a lot of prior tweets with hashtags en Espanol.  They consistently read things that would translate like #nogayadoptionever and #whygaysshouldn'tbeallowedtoadopt.   Oh Lordy, thought I.  Is this what matters to him?  It certainly seemed to be, as the peculiarly warped mirror of that social media presented Bergoglio to the world.

Couldn't it have been #behumble, or #loveyourneighbor, or #jesuslovesyou or #careforthepoor?   As the old hymn goes, They will know we are Christians by our #hashtags, by our #hashtags....

Sigh.

But I didn't give in to the temptation to tweet about it, because I don't really know Francis yet.  Wisdom holds it's tongue, and watches until it is sure.  Best to think, to stand back, to observe, and not to give in to the 24 second news cycle.  Human beings are complex creatures, not easily reduced to #hashtags or their most extreme perspectives.

A social media platform's got to know its limitations.

Popcorn Brain and the Oscars

I don't watch the Oscars, for pretty much the same reason I can't bring myself to watch the State of the Union address.   It's just too long and ritualistic, following a form and pattern that can't sustain my interest.  I find it tedious, no matter how the Academy attempts to make it edgy and entertaining.

But I like film as a medium, and do have some interest in the outputs of that long, long evening.

This year, I approached it in the same way I "watched" the State of the Union.   Meaning, I didn't watch it at all, but followed it on Twitter instead.  Putting it through that filter is fascinating, for a variety of reasons.

The variety of opinion was striking, particularly now that I've massively expanded my Twitter feed as part of my Lenten social media discipline.   According to my now intentionally diverse feed, Seth Macfarlane killed it/flailed miserably/was hysterical/was unwatchably cruel.   Shirley Bassey nailed her performance/was consistently flat.   Somewhere in there, there was a real event, but the twitterverse  was all over the place in interpreting it.

It was lighting up, though, and consistently.  That's not always the case, as the thousand plus folks I follow are wildly random.  But here was a shared experience that seemed to be picked up by enough of those that I've randomly added to my feed that it became a common theme.

Not all of us were lighting up.  The international portion of my feed really couldn't have cared less, reminding me that this is a North American phenomenon.  The tweeps who only tweep about one thing ever were still doing their thing, telling the world about the one thing they know how to talk about.  Typically, that's 1) themselves or, given my feed 2) Jesus.  Interlaced with the trending comments about the Oscars were the usual scripture quotations, snippets of song lyrics, self-indulgent teens telling me how they feel right at this very moment, and incoherent splurges of neurotransmitter twitterdata (omg @drzapper72 @rpgomalley t.co/Xy7z442s #lefreak!).

Following the Oscars on twitter was like watching popcorn pop.  Or rather, like watching the global popcorn brain of the human macroorganism respond to what it is seeing.  "This is happening now!  Now this is happening!  Hey, look at that!  Squirrel!" Over the last several weeks, my strong impression of this social network has been that it's amazingly neural, and watching it last night...at a period of high activity and high attention...only confirmed that.  

Years ago, at the dawn of the internet, I postulated in a Wired Magazine article that the internet was just the nascent structure of our evolution into a macroorganism.  This was a full decade before the arrival of social media, and Lord have mercy, does that feel more true now.

Encountering massive, culturally-shared experiences inside Twitter, I am reminded of nothing quite so much as the terse, staccato pulses of cells splashing out 140 character loads of virtual seratonin and acetylcholine.

It's fascinating.  

The It, The Thou, and The Tweeper

In social media use, one of the things that's perhaps most challenging personally, spiritually, and existentially is escaping the human tendency to view others as objects.  

Here is this spanking new medium, one that should allow us to connect with one another, in some wildly creative ways.  New ways.  Unprecedented ways.  Twitter can be like that, in its churn and whirl and global reach.  I can offer a word of affirmation to a South African, and drop a word of silliness with a colleague, and confirm the beauty of a sunset in Taiwan, all in thirty seconds.

But if social media becomes not about our encounter with the friend and neighbor and stranger, but instead becomes an instrument for furthering our own power, what is it?

 "Here I am," we cry.  "Look at me!  LOOK AT ME, YOU MORONS!   I AM THE QUEEN!  I AM A MIRACLE!  I AM THE SAVIOR OF MY TWITTERVERSE!"

And so we shout and flail about, doing the wild honkey dance with a box on our head, trying to get the world to Harlem Shake to our amazingness.  We provoke and we challenge, a hundred million trolls bellowing from under their bridges.

Worse still, we can come to see our "followers" as trophies, objects that validate our amazingness.  They can become not the sentient, self-aware souls that create those tweets and posts, but things.  Notches in our belt.  Kills on the side of our fighter.  Hair care products lined up in a row in our shower.  The bulging bag of stuff on the back of a wandering, homeless soul.

If we are like this, we do not say to them "Thou," as Martin Buber described life-giving human relationships.  We do not say, "I see the light of God behind your eyes, just as surely as it burns in me."   Instead, they can become "It."  They can become dead things, just instruments for furthering our own goals.

The distinction, I think, comes from direction of our intention.  If we approach social media as an instrument to further our agenda, then we are likely to think instrumentally about those we encounter.   We become like that corporation that focuses not on product, but on profit maximization.  We become like that government that focuses not on justice, but on order and power.   This is a loveless place.  It is a dangerous place, the alien wilderness in which our souls dissolve, consumed by the acid of their own desire.

If, instead, we view each human creature behind the tweet as a soul, our attitude changes.  That troll who howls out rage is just alone and in pain.  That catty remark comes because she's just had a bad day.  The beings around us remain as they were made, and our connection with them is deepened.

Destroying Your Silo: The Wrong Way to Use Twitter

So yesterday, in between prepping for Sunday, various and sundry kid-related errands, and checking in on my influenza-suffering wife, I went wide open throttle on Twitter.

I know how to use Twitter.  Or at least, I know how you're supposed to use Twitter.  It's a great medium for getting [insert your message here] splashed out there, if you follow the right people and get yourself followed by others.   There's lots of great advice about how to maximize your impact in the twitterverse, or whatever they're calling it these days.

I flagrantly disregarded all of that.  Instead of focusing in on a field, or carefully nurturing a sequence of well thought out relationships that I can use to market my [upcoming book/blog/self/soul], I just clicked wildly for an hour.

If the button said "Follow," I clicked it, across as wide a spectrum of political and religious opinion as I could manage.  I clicked and clicked, skimming account after account, sometimes so fast I didn't even have time to see who I was following.  I clicked until my wrist ached.

That went on until I hit the bump-stop, Twitter's spam-blocking rev-limiter, which prevents any user from following more than 1,000 people a day.  

Mouse smoking, I stepped back to look at the damage.  My feed was utterly different.  Random.  Strange.

No longer was it a blend of people I sort of knew either personally or professionally.

It was a great blurry mess, blorting out three-to-five new tweets a second, randomized and unpredictable.  A familiar face would pop up now and again, but it was mostly strangers.   Some were progressive, some conservative.  Some were profane, others dogmatic.  Some personal, others clearly fronts for businesses.  Many were in languages I don't even know.

Totally useless, one might say.  And one would be right.

And yet far more interesting.  Twitter had become, well, claustrophobic.  That silo of like-minded souls echoed with familiarity, humming the same tunes over and over again.  It was not reflective of reality, but instead was a projection of my own biases and predilections.  It was all about me, and in that space, I was far less likely to encounter something different.  Something unexpected.

That felt good, particularly given my recent reading of statistician Nate Silver's Signal and the Noise.  One of the core arguments in that book is that our tendency to silo ourselves, to only admit into evidence data that reinforces our out assumptions, that messes us up.  It makes us less likely to engage meaningfully with reality, and more likely to approach Creation unable to see it for what it is.

Having blown giant holes in that silo, it felt less isolating.  A place where one is more likely to encounter the stranger, and the other.  That is an important place.

This is a nontrivial improvement.

And heck, I still have another 900 follows to go before the Twitter-tenders cut me off.

Forty Days in the Twitterness

I have a low tolerance for twitter, one I share with my teenage children and most of their friends.  "Why would you even be on twitter," my teen son asked.  "It's only for people who think they're important."

It's always felt like chaos to me, a swirling miasma of fragmented conversations and bumpersticker-length teasers.   Spending time there feels vaguely like one of those times I'd be sitting in front of the TV as a child, late at night.  My asthma would have woken me, and in the absence of anything to do, I'd plop down in front of the tube and watch until the broadcast day ended.

And then there'd be the National Anthem.  And then static.  Just plain old noise.

Funny thing, though.  If you watch static long enough, your chest heaving for breath as your bronchioles slowly return to normal, you can see patterns in it.  There are whorls and spirals, as your mind tries to etch shape and meaning into the fuzz and pop of no-thingness.

Twitter feels like static, if you get all contemplative on it.  That means following broadly, following deeply, listening to the whole thing.  It's being in a room full of Pentecostals, all aglow with the Spirit, filling the air with an indescribable juddering chatter-din.  It's the hissing of wind through dry leaves.

It makes me feel a bit scattered, a bit torn, this shapeless thing.   It's a desert place.  It is tohu wabohu.  But even that can serve God's purposes, I remind myself.

And in this season of preparation, being b'midbar is a worthy thing.   So where others are fleeing their social media addictions and taking a break from the noise, it is into the noise that I will go.

On Ash Wednesday, I returned to my twitter account, and opened my ears, and begun to listen.   That listening begins with following, compulsively and relentlessly.   I've pored through the 140 character descriptor tags of hundreds and hundreds of tweeps, reduced to keywords and pithy descriptors.   If twitter suggests someone, I'll follow them, and then I'll follow the people who follow them, until the trickle becomes a roar.   I limit it, my following.  No empty eggs or nonpersons.  And I'm time delimiting it, because I must for my own sanity.

Will there be a signal in all of that noise?  What whispers will rise from the static?

It'll be...interesting.

Success, Failure, and Tebow

I am painfully oblivious to sports.

There was a period when I was not, back when I was a youngling.  While living in England, I was an earnest supporter of Aston Villa, for the sole reason that my youth league team wore their colors and coopted their name.  During my teen years, I was briefly into the Redskins, until I realized that I did not enjoy the psychological anguish that inflicted nearly every Sunday.  Life serves up enough pain as it is without being a 'Skins fan.

And so, gradually, I drifted into this place where sports are just part of the background noise of culture, part of the chatter, as immaterial to me as fashion trends or the behavior of B-list celebrities.   Still, it serves up some interesting stuff now and again, and the phenomenon of Tim Tebow has enough resonance with my actual interests that I can't help notice it.

Tebow is the goalie for the Denver Nuggets, and...wait...hold on.  Let me wiki that for a second.   Oops.  Start again.

Tebow is the quarterback for the Denver Broncos.  He is, best I can tell, an average-ish QB by the standards of the National Football League.  Winning the Heisman Trophy is not the mark of an average college ball player, and he did indeed win it while playing for the Florida Gators.  Pro ball does have a tendency to chew up and spit out Heisman winners, in my recollection, but Tebow has hung in there.  His physical gifts are enough to make him competitive, and while he's far from the best in the league, he's a young professional player with acceptable talents.

That, of course, is not what has made Tebow such an iconic figure.  He's a conservative evangelical Christian, home-schooled by missionary parents.  As such, he views the world through the lenses of that faith community. He prays a great deal.  He is earnest, and wears his faith on his sleeve.  Interviews almost invariably begin with him thanking his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and then thanking his team.  He makes a habit of kneeling to give thanks to his aforementioned Lord and Savior frequently, so frequently the action has become known as "Tebowing," and is effusively thankful to Jesus after a win.

This bugs people.  As a progressive Christian, I understand this.  Despite what is mistakenly taught to many young evangelicals, folks who are all up in yo bidness with their faith can be annoying.

Last week, as the New England Patriots were in the process of delivering a monstrous shellacking to the Broncos, I logged in to Twitter for a while, searching for hashtag #Tebow.   The game?  Meh.  Not my thing.  I was more interested in observing the overflowing cup of 140-character hateration on Twitter.   It did not disappoint.

Almost without exception, tweeps were gleefully rejoicing in Tebow's comeuppance.  Quip after quip poured from the Twitterverse, mocking him for his expressions of faith.   While I'm cut from very different theological cloth than Tebow, I confess to have found it really rather unpleasant.

Sure, God doesn't care who wins football games.  It's just a game, dagflabbit.  God is no more vested in the outcome of an NFL game than God is vested in a multiplayer round of Call of Duty, or in a really bare-knuckle game of Canasta.  In the broad scheme of things, it doesn't matter in the slightest.  This is why folks like Jimmy Fallon are so eager to creatively poke fun at Tebow.  How stupid of him to pray about it!  What a dumb-dumb-head he is!  Or words to that effect.

But as easy as it would be to go that route, I can't.  Why?

First, Tebow shows no signs of being a smug, self-righteous human being.  Yeah, he's got a bit of Jesus-Turettes in his speech patterns, but what sort of person does that make him?  By all accounts, his team members really like him.  In the locker room, he's patient and supportive and kind.  In interviews, he comes across as gentle-hearted and soft-spoken.  He is, best I can tell, a bit like a larger, beefier Ned Flanders.  I've known folks...conservative, Bible-believing...who were unbelievably giving, kind, and gracious because of their simple faith.  Mocking such a soul serves no purpose.

Second, Tebow is a football player.  That is what he does.  Football is a game, true.  But how much less meaningful is it, honestly, than any other human activity?  If I manage a small IT consulting business, is that really more meaningful?  From his faith, he chooses to pray and be grounded in his Maker on a regular basis as he goes about what he does.  That seems well within the bounds of the acceptable.  The question is:  what sort of football player does it make him?   The answer seems to be similar to the above:  a well-liked, supportive, good-hearted one.  If he wins, he's thankful and humble about it.  If he loses?  He's gracious.  

That, boys and girls, is the point and purpose of prayer.  It is not magic that bends the universe to your will.  It is, instead, the magic that allows you to maintain your integrity as a soul in the face of whatever comes your way.  I just can't see the problem.

With the season close to done, and the one football game I watch annually coming up, I do find myself wondering if the hum and crackle around Tebow will continue next season.

Google+ and the Integrated Person

I had a short exchange on Google+ today, with someone who'd suggested in a comment that a recent blog post of mine was "manufactured" and "irresponsible."  It was interesting, in that it represented the first time I've ever had any sort of interaction on that new-ish social network.

About two months ago, I plopped into Google+, along with everyone else.  This was, in the event you've forgotten, supposed to be a very big deal.  Here, finally, was a threat to Facebook's total dominance of the social network marketplace.   The "pitch" for this new network was that it would revolutionize social media.  Now, finally, there was a way to insure that your mom wasn't going to see you tagged in that picture backin' up and/or gettin' freaky on that skeeve while clubbing at 2:32 am Sunday morning.   

"But honey, didn't you say you couldn't make it to church because you had the flu?"

Having been kept outside with the rest of the rabble by the virtual bouncers at the gate as the hip and the powerful were admitted, I expected something different.  When I arrived on Google+, I expected to experience the humming chatter of eager first-adopters, as the net-elite filled the new network with their radiant, connected savvy.   

Instead, it was like going back and visiting my MySpace page.  It was dead as a doornail, as stale as canned laughter.   There was nothing going on.  

So I got to wondering why.

Part of it, I'm sure, is social network fatigue.  Those friends on Facebook haven't all migrated over, nor has everyone who follows you on Twitter.  Managing all of it is undoubtedly too much, and once you're invested in several online communities, you're probably at your saturation point.   There's only so scattered we can get, after all.

But I did wonder if perhaps...perhaps...the whole "Circles" thing is part of the reason that Google+ has proven so anticlimactic.  I've never seen any reason to break my online presence out into discrete and separate demographic groups.  It becomes yet another thing to manage, and Lord knows we don't need that.

There's something else, though.  Something more important.  If I post something on Facebook, or write something here, I don't care who sees it.  If you're an evangelical Christian or an atheist, a friend or a troll or my mom, you're welcome to see what I put out there.  

Rule of thumb, in the online world?  Never write or say anything that you're not willing to have everyone see.  That includes your aforementioned mother and the gentle-spirited eight year old child of the person whose web-site you're trolling.  Think and try to be discerning before you hit return or click post.

It's not a bad rule in life, actually.  For despite the unreflective self-indulgent me-ness of this era, self-editing is not dishonest.  It's the hallmark of both wisdom and personal integrity.  So what I say all represents me.

Well, not entirely all.  There's stuff I do and think that I don't put online.  There are things in my life that are intimate, and things in my life that I occasionally struggle with, that I'm not going to disclose in a long rambly post or a TMI moment on Facebook.

For those things, I talk to other people.  Face to face.  Person to person.  There, I don't really need another circle, nor do I need a mediating structure to help me connect with it.  That circle already exists, and is woven out of the flesh and faces of friends and family.

Maybe Google+ will survive.  But does it need to?  I don't think I'd even notice if it was gone.

Tweeting Tribalism

In an interesting crosspost over at Presbymergent and at his blog A Wee Blether, Adam Copeland pitches out a defense of social media as a means by which church can better be church.  By blogging and tweeting and...um..."facebooking," Copeland argues that we establish a profound and authentically spiritual connection to others and increase our awareness of others who share our faith.

There's real truth in that.  New media connects us to people we'd never have otherwise experienced.  There are folks I've known only online, and known for years, from whom I've been connected to writers and thinkers and music that have profoundly enriched my faith.  The ability to share and converse can be a serious blessing, and can enrich our ability to love God and neighbor.   It can be a powerful tool for grace.

As can a gesture.  As can the spoken word.  As can ink and paper.  The reach and immediacy of social media are different, though.  It has the immediacy of conversation, and the potential reach of mass media.

The spiritual challenge in social media is that it makes it easy for us to become tribal.  And we all want to be tribal.  It is our nature.   We like to be an "us."  We like to surround ourselves with sameness and the comfortable and the known.  In our global culture, there there are so many different voices.  Media can serve up the baffling and frightening reality that we don't necessarily hold Truth with a capital "T" quite as firmly as we might like.  We are not the center of things.  That shakes us.

So what social media offers us is a choice.  If we so choose, we can surround ourselves with sameness.  We can follow only those who interest us and agree with us.  We can fill our ears and lay our eyeballs only across those voices and words that reaffirm what we already know.   We can amass a vast array of witnesses who affirm our common knowledge, as our facebook friends, those we feed and those we follow all shout the same songs, and say the same things.  We can live our lives in the echo chamber din of the Daily Kos, or in Townhall.

In the relentlessly refreshing wave of tweets and status updates, we can become so lost in the ceaseless chorus of our own cyberclan that we lose the ability to see those different from us as anything other than our trollish enemy.  Yes, we yearn for the intimacy and comfort of the tribe.  But tribes, while great at being community, have a tendency to do a really for-crap job of being beloved community. 

There lies our other social media choice.  If we so choose, we can use social media to open ourselves up to the other.  Yes, we listen particularly to those who are called to openness, both to those called to be constantly reforming and to those called to hold on to what is good.   But we also listen to those with whom we disagree.  We follow those who are different.  We rss feed those who are supposed to be our enemies.   That doesn't mean we acquiesce.  We're allowed to still disagree.  But in listening, in understanding, we mindfully use social media to stir in ourselves both grace and compassion towards even our most implacable trolls.

When that becomes our habit of being in the strange virtual half-light, then and only then do we start moving towards a twitter theology, towards living through social media in a way that can be called authentically Christian.