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Prayer In The Facebook Age

#1
C C Offline
This should probably go in "Religions & Spirituality" as much as here; but the latter's shorter on topics.

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/...cebook-age

EXCERPT: [...] We are in danger of losing these replenishing, corrective moments of solitary faith. Silence and seclusion are harder to find, and fewer people seek them out. You find a lone bench in the park on a fall afternoon, gaze up at the sky through the branches, and begin the Rosary only to have a power walker march by barking into an invisible mic. It’s not just the noise, it’s his connection to absent persons, as if to say that being in one place alone with the Lord is insufficient.

Social media is the culprit. Text­ing, selfies, updates, chats, snapchats, tweets, multiplayer games, blogs, wikis, and email enable people to gossip, boast, rant, strategize, self-promote, share, collaborate, inform, emote, and otherwise connect with one another anywhere and all the time. The volume is astounding. Earlier this year, Facebook boasted 1.23 billion active users, while late last year Twitter’s 200 million users sent 400 million tweets per day. According to Nielsen Media, a teen with a mobile device sends or receives on average around 3,300 text messages per month, in addition to logging 650 minutes of phone calls.

Those habits, which researchers term “hypersociality,” dominate leisure time. Data analyst Bill Tancer found in 2008 that social media had passed pornography as the most popular type of search. The whole range of fallen human motives passes through the tools, but the prime one is, precisely, “I want not to be alone.”

[...] In his Time magazine profile of Mark Zuckerberg, Man of the Year for 2010, Lev Grossman stated the aims of Facebook: "Facebook wants to populate the wilderness, tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world, a serendipitous world. You’ll be working and living inside a network of people, and you’ll never have to be alone again."

Zuckerberg told a reporter the same year, “And no matter where you go, we want to ensure that every experience you have will be social.” Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, announced in a 2012 talk at MIT, “We’re social animals. It’s deep into our identity about how we discover meaning in life, what we think is important about what we do.” In conversation with Andrew Keen, Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter, states bluntly, “The future will be social. . . . The social will be the killer app of the twenty-first century.” By this way of thinking, isolation is hurtful abandonment, quarantine, a denial of support.

[...] Loneliness is everywhere. I see it in my students when I tell them to turn off the TV while studying and one blurts out, “I couldn’t do that—the silence would drive me crazy.” Or when you watch someone at a bus stop end one phone call and promptly dial up another one, and the words you hear have no urgency to them, proving that the only need lay in finding someone to talk to.

[...] The sad truth about all this has two parts. One, the friends and connections one forms, the attention one gathers through digital tools, fail to meet the spiritual hunger. The universal hope that ­I-am-not-alone-and-unacknowledged needs stronger stuff—we aren’t so shallow. This is why the stunning geometrical growth in social-­media volume has occurred. This and that connection aren’t enough, so you grasp for more of them, more “Friends” and “People Talking About This.”

[...] And two, most pitiably, it obscures the surest and permanent source of comfort: God. People awash in ­social media can’t get past the paradox that the best salve for loneliness is ­properly applied alone. They look for answers in added connections, and more-­emotional ones, but God isn’t a closer contact and better friend. He transcends the social, and you must seek him beyond the medium of “share” and “like.” In solitary prayer, the secular pleasures dissipate and the successes of social media melt into nothingness. You drop your social self.

[...] This may explain the findings of a recent study showing a correlation between Internet use and religious disaffiliation. Using data from the General Social Survey, computer scientist Allen B. Downey concluded that Internet use accounts for 20 percent (5.1 million people) of overall decreases in religious commitment since 1990.

[...] That disposition has hit most strongly among the young, the heaviest users. To reverse it, my advice to parents, ministers, and other mentors is not to speak to them of God’s greatness and love, nor to assure them, “God is with you always and best felt in solitude.” Young people trust most the evidence of their own experience. So, give them a spiritual exercise to perform before each session of social media begins...
#2
Magical Realist Offline
Quote:This may explain the findings of a recent study showing a correlation between Internet use and religious disaffiliation. Using data from the General Social Survey, computer scientist Allen B. Downey concluded that Internet use accounts for 20 percent (5.1 million people) of overall decreases in religious commitment since 1990.

It is not a stretch to go from an invisible friend you talk to while praying to an invisible friend you text to. The assumption is that your life, at least during the few moments when you AREN'T telling someone about it, is an interesting drama or movie that deserves more than just your attention. Religion is in this sense the original social medium. It is the big Facebook in the sky under which you used to live as if under the scrutiny of a giant hyperbored friend who "likes you" all the time and even texts you in the form of an ancient book called the Bible. So now your disembodied chatbuddy becomes someone on the other side of the country. Not TOO drastic of a transition. Still the addictively fed craving to have your boring little life public and on display, a reality series watched by others as if it all meant more than it does. Still the inability to be alone and to find in that aloneness the calm self-assurance to not have to "be" anything to anyone. Just being yourself, in the moment, for itself alone.


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