hello holiday!

24 May 2010

An experiment in community.

~Julia Pickerill

I have had an esoteric and slightly vague philosophical reason to take a holiday from Facebook for quite some time, without an ability to fully articulate the particularities. But I came across this from Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and though it was written ages ago before the internet even existed it soundly expounds on my feelings, in general, about the age we live in:

“Today, a kind of planetal point of view has burst upon mankind. The world is rumbling and erupting in ever-widening circles around us. The tensions, conflicts and sufferings even in the outermost circles touch us all, reverberate in all of us. We cannot avoid these vibrations.

But just how far can we implement this planetal awareness? We are asked today to feel compassionately for everyone in the world; to digest intellectually all the information spread out in public print, and to implement in action every ethical impulse aroused by our hearts and minds. The inter-relatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold. Or rather – because I believe the heart is infinite – modern communication loads us with more problems than the human frame can carry. It is good, I think, for our hearts, our minds, our imaginations to be stretched; but body, nerve, endurance and life-span are not as elastic. My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds. I cannot marry all of them, or bear them all as children, or care for them all as I would my parents in illness or old-age. Our grandmothers, and even – with some scrambling – our mothers, lived in a circle small enough to let them implement in action most of the impulses of their hearts and minds. We were brought up in a tradition that has now become impossible, for we have extended our circle throughout space and time.

Faced with this dilemma what can we do? How can we adjust our planetal awareness to our Puritan conscience? We are forced to make some compromise. Because we cannot deal with the many as individuals, we sometimes try to simplify the many into an abstraction called the mass…”

And she goes on to talk about how we more easily spend our life deferring ‘in general’ to this mass instead of spending our minutes deferring ‘in particular’ to the individual. In other words: while we feel radically interrelated with one another, we have more often than not reduced our experiences into a status line, posted them for hundreds of people (many of whom we don’t even personally know), gained a handful of abbreviated replies, and called it ‘community’.

Clearly, things like Facebook (and blogs) are all very nice and I really do love the chance to be connected with my friends since many of them live in different places around the globe. I also enjoy reading about what people have made for dinner, and what my friends' kid said at the dentist, and how to pray for everyone's latest crisis. I’m serious. I really am grateful to have a sense of connection with so many. Only I hate the feeling that it leaves me with: I want to call, to congratulate, to pray, to make a meal and bring it over, to serve, to join, to meet up with people for a long-missed coffee… but I can’t. Like Anne M.L. says, I cannot bear all of the impulses.

Now, I fully understand that perhaps I am severely old, but I prefer to think of it as a sort of rebellion against the novel. God forbid I trade status updates of 800+ people in for more time with which to write letters, make phone calls, or actually sit across the table from people and talk.

So this, for me, is a bit of an experiment. I am quitting Facebook. I am fully expecting it to fail, and assume I’ll miss my hundreds of fb friends so much, and miss the details of their lives so much, and miss my friend’s hourly updates so much, and miss the pictures of your kids so much, and miss getting updates about my ex-boyfriend from when I was 15 so much, and miss it all…… so much that I’ll just click on the “bring Facebook back to me this failed and indeed I am an addict to information plus I just think to much and should really turn off my overzealous brain” button and be re-assimilated shortly.

Until then, this is all the social rebellion I can muster up. I’ll entertain it for a bit. Like Anne M.L. says, it is not my heart that has become overloaded, but simply the rest of me.

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i am finally making the leap to unplug for awhile! my thoughts are very linear to what is being relayed in this article. so, goodbye facebook. goodbye twitter. hello holiday!

and, don't worry, julia was more than happy for me to borrow her eloquent words:)