My love/hate relationship with social media

At the end of church, after meetings, when I surface from the tube, the first thing I do is check my phone. Sometimes I’ve felt it buzzing away while I’ve sat politely ignoring it’s vibrating clarion call, but even if I haven’t, I might have missed it so I check anyway. And those times I exile myself from communication for minutes or even hours, I fervently check as soon as I can. I don’t want to be out of the loop.

Plenty of the communicative stimuli are not even directed at me. I graze through twitter browsing the frequently inane or irrelevant things others have to say. And those I do care about only occasionally have any true connection to the rest of my life.

I am at the same time connected to everyone but connecting with no one.

There’s a growing commentariat on the affect of new media on our lives: how we spend our time together huddled over our individual phones, ignoring the people we are supposedly with.

There are the critics, highlighted this week through a column in the New York Times, and then followed up in the Guardian, who make the case that the advent and avalanche of communication is making us more lonely and less able to converse.

And then there are the passionate defenders of the cause, who emphasise the social of social media. Just because it is different does not mean it is bad. It is just a new form of communicating, the telephone was not the death knell of social interaction and neither will twitter. In fact, they would argue, because of it’s scale it enables community that is not restricted by physical location.

For me, I’m stuck in the middle. I love the information that social media, particularly twitter, feed to me through a personally audited set of sources. And the fact I connect with people I otherwise wouldn’t is a bonus. But it’s not community.

The ideas behind this post would never have surfaced without social media, I first saw Simon Jenkin’s Guardian piece on twitter, then the New York Times one on facebook, and then a tweet sent my mind into overdrive. Vicky Beeching, worship leader and twitter supremo, had thrown out a couple of questions to her legion of followers (20,000 or so), and then summed it up with “Thanks for all the advice on cameras & on your favourite WordPress themes…I love the way this community works! #HoorayForSocialMedia”. (Caveat: I think Vicky Beeching is great, her tweet just got me thinking, and I guess having a big following poses many challenges of its own.)

First reaction: if I had 20,000 followers I’d get pretty good feedback to questions I asked. It’s not social media winning here, it’s celebrity.

Second reaction: this isn’t community, it’s a bunch of people who for short moments of time alight on topics of shared interest.

Third reaction: if I had 20,000 followers I’d have to put in a tonne of effort to maintain engagement with them.

If I assess my use of social media as a source of media then I judge it with one set of criteria, and if I see it as a social forum I use another. They come out with two quite different results.

And that got me thinking even deeper. Maybe I do social media wrong, maybe if I’m to really get the social part of it I need to engage more with it, talk to people more, respond more, build connections, give and not just take. But really, as much as I enjoy the eclectic range of conversations that I can become absorbed in, the question I am reaching to bring to some sort of conclusion, is: to what end am I working? Am I deepening relationships or avoiding them?

I hear stories of people striking up conversation with someone, asking about some aspect of their life they recall from prior interaction only to realise they have never spoken before and the information has only been gleaned through loitering on their facebook page.

I said that the telephone has not killed social interaction. But I don’t really like the telephone. I use it, and I think it is hugely useful, but if I never had to have another telephone call I wouldn’t be upset. And having proper conversations on the phone in public just seems odd to me, I’ll sit down with a cup of tea on the sofa if I’ve got to maintain contact with those I otherwise would not see.

Before I go searching out more relationships I want to prioritise those that I am already engaged in. I will always opt for time spent with people, because time matters. It gives the room for silence, the space for posture to convey meaning, the scope for openness and vulnerability. When you spend time with people it’s not just the things that you say that matter, it is your presence. It is the fact that you cared enough to trail through the rain to see them. It’s not just the bottle of wine you share but the words that flow from stoic compassion. In the immediacy of twitter a moment is all you have. The movement of interactions that form a relationship are lost among myriad competing claims.

For me at least, social media is about me. I’m in it for the information it will give me. I’m in it for the followers and the retweets. The flattening of access that benefits those of us on the ground floor. And that means I’ve got to be very cautious about how I use it. I have to censor myself to prevent the nefarious elements coming to the fore.

But hey, as we so often fall back to, we’re all different: what’s a challenge for me does not mean it is a challenge for you.

And maybe that is true. Yet too often it is a convenient excuse to avoid having to address hard truths. I think it’s the contemporary introvert/extrovert debate. If you’re an introvert that doesn’t give you an excuse from avoiding making new friends. And if you’re an extrovert that’s not a reason to avoid finding depth with a few people. We’re all different, but the challenges we face are frequently the same.

How do we balance the growth of community, in any form – online or in person, with ensuring that we’re going deeper?

In the field of Family Studies, we tend to classify marriages into two different, yet not-mutually exclusive, categories: traditional and companionate. The traditional marriage is rooted in ideals, social expectations, the pursuit of highly emotional experiences. You’ll often hear traditional couples say things like, “we were meant to be together”, “(s)he is everything I’ve ever wanted”. Companionate couples, on the other hand, are mostly appreciative of the daily activities. They are most thankful for their spouse witnessing their lives. They value their partner checking in after a doctor’s appointment much more than a getaway to the Bahamas. Donald Miller perfectly captures what academics would describe as a companionate marriage in “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years”. At some point in the book, he asks an older couple about the success of their marriage, and the wife explains that “she had married a guy, and he was just a guy. He wasn’t going to make all of their problems go away because he was just a guy. And that freed her to love him just as a guy”. Researchers avoid placing the two notions of tradition and companionship on a spectrum, as we know the two can coexist. A better analogy might be a pyramid, like Maslow’s pyramid of needs. We first need companionship for true expressions of love to emanate.

Friendships are very similar. They can thrive on the fun times, the laughs, the trips to the city, the high, enjoyable, emotions. Or they are rooted in the notion of companionship. They do not seek personal gain from the relationship, inasmuch as they yearn for someone to see their lives. At first glance, it would appear as if social media allows us to do just that. We see the Instagram pictures, we read the status updates, we see the pictures. However, the majority of social media users only post what they find interesting. They post pictures of their trips to Vegas, their newborn baby, their favorite book. Social media does not capture the mundane (unless you are one of “those people” who documents every single squirrel, cup of coffee, and flower that comes your way). For the most part, we share the fun times, the laughs, the trips to the city. While it is certainly not “wrong” to have these kinds of friendships, it is a fundamental necessity to have our lives witnessed, the ordinary and the extraordinary. Social media does not capture the ordinary. So that is my (very) long answer to your question, how do we ensure we are going deeper, we become intentional about valuing the ordinary.

One thought on “My love/hate relationship with social media”

Katherine says:

April 30, 2012 at 11:47 pm

In the field of Family Studies, we tend to classify marriages into two different, yet not-mutually exclusive, categories: traditional and companionate. The traditional marriage is rooted in ideals, social expectations, the pursuit of highly emotional experiences. You’ll often hear traditional couples say things like, “we were meant to be together”, “(s)he is everything I’ve ever wanted”. Companionate couples, on the other hand, are mostly appreciative of the daily activities. They are most thankful for their spouse witnessing their lives. They value their partner checking in after a doctor’s appointment much more than a getaway to the Bahamas. Donald Miller perfectly captures what academics would describe as a companionate marriage in “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years”. At some point in the book, he asks an older couple about the success of their marriage, and the wife explains that “she had married a guy, and he was just a guy. He wasn’t going to make all of their problems go away because he was just a guy. And that freed her to love him just as a guy”. Researchers avoid placing the two notions of tradition and companionship on a spectrum, as we know the two can coexist. A better analogy might be a pyramid, like Maslow’s pyramid of needs. We first need companionship for true expressions of love to emanate.

Friendships are very similar. They can thrive on the fun times, the laughs, the trips to the city, the high, enjoyable, emotions. Or they are rooted in the notion of companionship. They do not seek personal gain from the relationship, inasmuch as they yearn for someone to see their lives. At first glance, it would appear as if social media allows us to do just that. We see the Instagram pictures, we read the status updates, we see the pictures. However, the majority of social media users only post what they find interesting. They post pictures of their trips to Vegas, their newborn baby, their favorite book. Social media does not capture the mundane (unless you are one of “those people” who documents every single squirrel, cup of coffee, and flower that comes your way). For the most part, we share the fun times, the laughs, the trips to the city. While it is certainly not “wrong” to have these kinds of friendships, it is a fundamental necessity to have our lives witnessed, the ordinary and the extraordinary. Social media does not capture the ordinary. So that is my (very) long answer to your question, how do we ensure we are going deeper, we become intentional about valuing the ordinary.