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One of the core values of the Postmodern world is personal autonomy. Technology is now making real autonomy possible—the power to create your own reality. But within this quest for autonomy, the term “friend” is being redefined. Consider this: MySpace, a favorite of the high school crowd, now boasts more than 200 million participants. According to one study, half of Americans between ages 12 and 17 belong to this social network!! Also, Facebook, which began linking college students, boasts more than 40 million members. In the words of Michael Gerson, “devotees regularly update their online profiles—posting messages and pictures; listing their interests, favorite rock bands and sexual preferences; ‘poking’ acquaintances in a kind of virtual wink; sending out party invitations; blogging about the smallest events of their lives. These milestones are turned into a news ticker that keeps friends informed. Couples announce they are ‘in a relationship’—using Facebook to solemnize their commitment like a virtual justice of the peace. Memorials are posted in honor of those who die—a tribute that does little to touch a lonely grief.”
The entrance into this virtual world of friendship is the “revelation of personal information.” You can learn more about a person through Facebook and MySpace than if you spent hours with them face to face. But these mediums do not enhance modesty! Gerson writes, “Most disturbingly, this form of friendship is the rejection of modesty—of restraint and inhibition. People end up treating their own lives as the media treats Paris Hilton’s, shining a public spotlight on the most intimate details. They become the publisher and object of their own tabloid.” MySpace and Facebook permit the autonomous individual to truly define his/her own reality and make dozens (perhaps hundreds) of virtual friends—on their own terms. Here then is the problem: Typically, a friendship involves loyalty, sympathy and sacrifice. It is a relationship based on and rooted in trust. That is hardly what we are seeing in MySpace or Facebook! As with most things in the postmodern culture, these mediums are cultivating superficiality and shallowness, not intimacy, depth and modesty. T.S. Eliot once remarked that television as a medium allows millions of people to laugh at the same joke and still be lonely. Social networking via the Internet is taking Eliot’s observation to a depth hardly ever envisioned. Postmodern teens are thriving on the superficiality of the Internet. They are defining reality on their terms and still finding themselves profoundly lonely! That is hardly an advance of civilization. In fact, one could easily argue that it is actually a backward step.
Jesus once said, “no one has greater love that this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:13).” Of course, He was talking about Himself and the depth of His commitment to His disciples as their friend. It is highly doubtful that the Internet is cultivating that depth of friendship. Instead, postmodern teens are drowning in an autonomy that permits them to be incredibly transparent about every dimension of their lives, on their terms, and yet still be lonely, debased and intensely unhappy.
See Michael Gerson’s enlightening article in the Washington Post (5 October 2007). |
