Towards the goal of “getting small”
Finally, after actually months of planning to do it, I deleted my Facebook account. For whatever reason, I was dragging my feet. I didn’t want to figure out the process for downloading photos and videos. I felt wistful about the interactions I’d had with old classmates. I wondered how I would be able to promote events or (he said sheepishly) myself.
Then I started listening to Nicholas Carr’s new book, Superbloom, and rapidly felt these caveats and hesitations melt away. Carr’s book describes the meteoric rise of social media and its world-shattering impact upon the way we think and interact with one another. What I found particularly surprising was his discussions of studies on how social media promotes polarization. Although part of the way this happens is through the creation of echo chambers, the other driver is through the newsfeed’s amplification of contextless posts from multiple perspectives and its algorithmic investment in displaying content that prompts a reaction. What studies have shown is that it doesn’t even matter if you’re hearing from “different sides”: the more information you receive, the more partisan you become.
The other trigger was a post that I made recently — my most popular post ever. It was fitting that it was my last. My daughters and I had been out for a walk at lunch time. As we were walking down the road, I noticed a car coming towards me. The reason I noticed it was that its back window was down. A young man was leaning against the open window and I saw that he was holding what looked like a Nerf gun. I thought that was strange, but didn’t think anything of it until I suddenly heard this rapid, clicking sound. I felt something go past my face. I realized that he was shooting at us as he drove by! Bewildered, I asked the girls if they were ok. One of my daughters said that she had been hit and that it had felt like a bee flying into her neck. The place she was hit was red. As we walked home, the red mark started to turn into a welt.
We called the police and eventually got through. They came out, took statements, and the story from that point continues in ways that I won’t describe here. The part that I’m interested in right now is related to my most popular Facebook post ever.
When I got home, my wife called the police and I said that I would post something to the Facebook community group for our neighbourhood. I wanted to flag to people there that this person was in the area and that folks should be careful if they were out walking. Within minutes of posting the story, the comments and “likes” (although most of these were angry-faced or sad-faced emojis) poured in. I think my last count before deleting my account was 350+ “likes” and over 150 comments.
Many of the comments were kind, empathetic, and reassuring. People said that they hoped my daughter was ok. People were upset that the event had occurred and bewildered that someone could think doing that was acceptable.
Others of the comments were less great. One person asked about the race of the perpetrator. Someone took me to task for not making a police report, although my original post didn’t say anything about that either way.
Responses were still trickling in this morning, five days later.
On the one hand, I appreciated the surge of support from people whom — I assume — live in my neighbourhood. On the other hand, I didn’t actually know any of them.
Separately, I had told the story of what happened to friends. The empathy and concern they responded with was of a different character. It was deeply invested, grounded in their knowledge of me and/or my kids. Unlike the Facebook commentators, though, it was also balanced. As a piece of information, it existed within the larger nexus of their holistic and embodied knowledge of me. They expressed care and concern, but the event was thankfully not everything.
Let’s Get Small
Lately, the repeated refrain that I have been thinking about has been a variation on an old Steve Martin comedy routine: Let’s Get Small.
One of Carr’s recommendations in Superbloom is to introduce friction into our digital interactions. I like this a lot and have written about it elsewhere. It aligns with one of Albert Borgmann’s observations about technology, which is that technology has to do with rendering something “instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy.” The other thing that friction does, though, is to preserve the slow, embodied, clunky, contextualized experience of being a person among other people.
There were many things I loved about Facebook. It really did make me feel closer to people that I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to be around. It also made me feel less bad about losing close connections with people because it gave me the illusion that I was still in connection with them. After all, I had seen their post about their recent medical issue or their recent baby or their recent political stance, so didn’t I still know them in some way?
Honestly, I don’t think that illusion is necessarily bad. After all, we all only have so many spaces on our Lego block to accommodate real, flesh-and-blood connections.1 On the other hand, though, what might happen if I was truthful with myself about the people I was actually connected with and whose lives were interwoven with mine? This isn’t to say that there aren’t different levels of engagement still: some people I see daily, some weekly, and some less often than that. But did I actually need the other category provided by Facebook — one which was not dissimilar from the category I’d always kept for celebrities or historical personages (i.e., a list of facts, albeit bolstered with memories of real interactions from the past)? The real memories I had of many of these people were meaningful to me, and I wanted to cherish them. But they were qualitatively different from the “memories” I’d had since of various posts or interactions we might have shared on Facebook. Again, this doesn’t make those digital interactions “bad,” but I wonder if I might appreciate my IRL interactions more if I stopped cultivating the digital ones.
More than that, though, the principle of “getting small” is really one about trying to move at a more human pace in a more human space. The Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama’s book, Three Mile an Hour God articulates this vision of humanity well. Although we, of course, can go hundreds of miles an hour in a car or on a plane, taken on our own frail, human capacities, we move slowly. Technology has made us believe that we are greater than these capacities, that we are not limited by them. That may be true from a certain perspective, yet residing in that larger world of possibility can also mean losing track of certain human qualities as well.
As Koyama says, writing of the Christian belief that God’s revelation to the world of God’s self took the form of a poor, Jewish carpenter named Jesus, who lived in a small community, had friends and family, walked most places, and was eventually killed by a vicious empire that sought to reach the ends of the earth:
God walks slowly because he is love. If he is not love,
he would have gone much faster.
I hadn’t been visiting Facebook very regularly for the last couple of years and, before that, I’d even taken a few years off from using it all. It wasn’t a huge time waster for me. Still, my decision to delete Facebook altogether is an attempt to affirm in my own mind — like a kind of sacrament or inward, symbolic act — that it’s time for me to get small and to work more on practising the kind of love for others that moves slowly at the pace of being human.
- My friend uses this image of a Lego block to describe the fact that, between time, personal capacity, introversion/extroversion, and other factors, we all are only able to know a certain number of people well. Dunbar’s number tries to quantify this idea. ↩︎