Our Nomadic Existence: How Electronic Culture Shapes Community

by Shane Hipps

ELECTRONIC NOMADS

Our new electronic nomadic existence is a powerful one. We do not sojourn as a group — we drift and journey on our own. But we have radios, TVs, iPods, cell phones, and laptops. We are constantly participating in a network of other disembodied acquaintances. So we are hardly aware of our aloneness.

These virtual relationships have a strange effect. They provide just enough of a connection to paralyze our best efforts at unmediated community. In this kind of “community,” our contacts involve very little real risk and demand even less of us personally. In this sense we experience another paradox: intimate anonymity. We have the illusion of being intimate with people while remaining totally anonymous if we desire — this is the draw and danger of so-called virtual community. There is no need to offer real vulnerability. Community that promises freedom from rejection and makes authentic emotional investment optional can be extremely appealing, remarkably efficient, and a lot more convenient.

In this way, virtual community functions a bit like cotton candy: it goes down easy and satiates our immediate hunger, but it doesn’t provide much in the way of sustainable nutrition. It spoils our appetites for the kind of authentic community that is essential to spiritual vitality.

Authentic community is an elusive and slippery term. Borrowing from sociologists and theologians, I share the assumption that authentic community involves high degrees of intimacy, permanence, and proximity. These practices foster shared memories as well as a shared imagination of the future, elements crucial to becoming the people of God.⁶ While relative intimacy can be gained in virtual settings, the experiences of permanence and proximity have all but vanished. Without these we lose our shared memories and imagination for where we are going, elements central to our identity as the Body of Christ.

If virtual community functions like cotton candy, then authentic community is more like broccoli. It may not always taste good, but it provides crucial nourishment for the formation of our identities. Authentic community will undoubtedly be marked by conflict, risk, and rejection. At the same time it offers the deepest levels of acceptance, intimacy, and support.

I’m not morally opposed to cotton candy. It serves a legitimate, albeit limited, function in one’s diet. In the same way I am not morally opposed to virtual community; it also serves an important and limited function in our electronic culture. The problem is that virtual community is slowly becoming the preferred means of relating.

I have two friends who live three blocks from one another. They talk several times a day on their cell phones. They consider themselves the closest of friends and were each other’s best man. When I last spoke with one of them, he said he hadn’t seen his friend in eight weeks. Both have lamented to me on separate occasions that they know very little about each other’s deepest struggles and desires; it remains a somewhat superficial relationship. They are quite unaware of the cell phone’s power to inoculate our need to connect in person, which is where true intimacy and depth are born.

THE BLOGGING MIND

Blogs, when taken to an extreme, present a related problem. They allow us to participate in organic dialogue. However, they also have a remarkably addictive tendency to tickle our intellects, seducing us into a Pandora’s box of perpetual links, people, and ideas. The result is that we are drawn wider, but rarely deeper. This is true both in terms of the ideas we explore and the relationships we build. The great wonder of blogging is found in its dynamic speed. We are exposed to many more ideas than previously possible, and we are given a chance to dialogue about them in near real-time settings. However, the medium of blogging, regardless of content, has a natural bias toward confusion rather than clarity. It prefers careless language patterns, slack logic, and superficial relationships. This is at the expense of intellectual precision, thoughtful language, and meaningful connection with those in close proximity.

Avid political blogger and Atlantic Monthly columnist Andrew Sullivan made this observation about himself in a March 3, 2008 post entitled “A Blog Sabbath?”

I’m all but surgically attached to the web. I’m working 24/7, and increasingly isolated from social interaction. Going to the Atlantic offices helps, but getting a grip on this thing is hard. The blogging mind does not easily adjust to reading a book or allowing an unformed thought to stay unformed. Even when you carve out time for more offline reading or living, it’s hard to switch gears. And the danger of burnout is serious.

Evidence of his addiction is found in the fact that his blog now serves as his confession booth. Only instead of a priest there to absolve him, there are a million disembodied, faceless, and anonymous souls who offer their well-intentioned, but helpless and hollow condolences.

It should haunt us that so many churches are in hot pursuit to make use of this growing Web 2.0 technology. It is one of the many thin “tools” employed in search of the holy grail of “building community.” However, they will encounter this new medium with the proverbial slip on the banana peel if they persist in thinking it is a neutral aid, completely unaware of its natural bias and overwhelming force to dismantle authentic community. Virtual community inadvertently inoculates people against the desire to physically be with other people. Being together is nice, but not necessary.

Previous 1 2 3 4 5 Next

Comments

Eric Brown

"You can't change the methods without changing the message." So true...

Joe

There are 2 aspects here: 1) worldly/flesh; and 2) spirit/Trinitarian.

On the deep, spiritual level, the truth is the word, the medium is the Trinity, with the Holy Spirit being "the medium." The truth/word never changes, but the meaning and depth of understanding changes as we mature spiritually (towards the Divine connection). If Christians really understand and live this, the worldly media/medium won't have a deep lasting effect, and the "programming" effect of advertising is minimal as we focus on God. We then look at the world around us in a MUCH different way. The worldly methods and message will change, but the truth never does - it's nice to know in a crazy world there is that one Constant!!

L.L. Barkat

"When you tap into the most intense or emotionally poignant experiences, you discover the trigger for all consumer impulses. "

Just that. So fascinating.

When we act as consumers, then, what are we doing? Is it perhaps a form of spiritual experience, as we perhaps try to tap into, or alter, our own psyches through action?

Edward van Vliet

of course, this year edmonton, aberta (canada) is celebrating his centenary so there's been a lot of mcluhanery going on here. An interesting collection of essays exploring his throught and its connection to his own theological positioning can be found at gingko press (which publishes a number of books about mcluhan - love the carson collaboration, the book of probes) or here:
http://www.amazon.com/Medium-Light-Reflections-Religion/dp/1606089927/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318874261&sr=1-1

Curtis

There's a potent irony to each of us who are posting replies here because we "connected" with this excellent article.

Today is the very last day of my 3 month sabbatical - my first in 22 years of ministry. One month was spent in the DR Congo; a week in the intensely crowded streets of Kinshasa and the rest in rural villages. So for that time I was the fish who was plucked out of my technological fish tank and experienced something very different. Although I believed myself to be reasonably well connected to people here in Portland OR, the intensity of constant connection in the Congo was at first exhausting. In Kinshasa, a city of almost 12 million people, everyone is so amazingly linked. You walk amidst endless crowds on jammed streets, or ride in mini-vans with more than 20 people stacked on wooden benches. And people talk! Boy do they talk. On those mini-van busses, conversations among strangers are unceasing. "Where are you going? What are you doing today? Where did you get that? Do you know how to get to...?" You buy your daily bread, your vegetables, and change your money right on the street from people you see everyday. People ask about every detail of life, regularly. You either interact and rely on people, or you don't survive. Literally.

In the villages it was much different - the crowds are missing - but the connections are much the same. With anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand people in a village, you are known and your family is know. It's likely that families have stayed in the same village for generations, and the stories of families are known as well. I've been reading about African culture and came across this from John Mbitit, a Kenyan theologian: He writes this about African culture:

"Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say: 'I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.' This is a cardinal point in the understanding of the African view of man"

I read these words before my trip and they were interesting. After visiting, though, they took on new depth.

Since I've returned to the states and my techno-centric life, a heavy loneliness has swept over me. I am so deeply disconnected and I'm very much looking forward to going back to my church (tomorrow!). I'm not overly giddy about getting back to work (shh, don't tell), but I miss people so much. The time in Africa taught me how we have gotten so accustomed to living in relationally impoverished patterns, that we don't even feel the loss.

Mike

There are a lot of great thoughts here, but I most enjoyed the introduction. I have often felt that the religion of our time is Consumerism.

In the past, religion has always answered the question of how to get god or the gods to give us what we want. Now there's no need for that answer. To get what we want, we just reach out and swipe or we click here. No wonder the question of God's existence has changed to God's significance.

Michael H

"“The methods change, but the message stays the same.” There it is — the rallying cry of the evangelical church..."

Aha, the Evangelical Thing. Been there, done that, read Bible, came home to the Catholic Church, sigh of relief.

However, Christianity is not medium versus message, it's the communication of both a message and simultaneously the Thing it refers to. The Presence of God says "I am present". Most of The West has subtly changed this "message" and hence the methods have changed.

Brad Waller

Praise God! Marshall McLuhan is being rediscovered, but in a more up-to-date and Christian context. Shane Hipps' excellent article does great service toward protecting and maintaining "authentic" Christian community.

Comments are now closed

ALSO BY SHANE HIPPS

ALSO IN SCIENCE + TECH

by Louie Giglio and Jennifer Wiseman

by Alister McGrath

by Rusty Pritchard