Wednesday, February 11, 2009

More on Facebook

Last week, I posted a link to an article by Al Mohler about Facebook. This week, it is the perspective of Steve Tuttle from Newsweek. He says,

Being on Facebook is like volunteering to receive spam, and the more successful you are at finding friends, the more spam you get! In the end, Facebook is really the emptiest, loneliest place on the whole World Wide Web. It's all static and white noise, and the steady streams of status updates start to look like ASDF, ASDF, ASDF after a while.

Here’s a few other links about the topic:

25 Things I Didn’t Want to Know About You from Time.

25 More Things I Didn’t Want to Know About You also from Time.

And Mark Galli from CT comments on insightfully here:

Yes, it's like church coffee hour, but the difference is that I keep running into new people to be trivial with, so it's all so very exciting. "Guess who I ran into on Facebook today?" I exclaim to my wife every so often. But I never go deeper with anyone there. And the few times I have tried, through messaging and e-mail, it's been an utter disaster.

That's because, as we are slowly learning in this techie age, electronic communication is a poor substitute for audible conversation and physical presence with another. There's a reason God created us with bodies, and why bodily presence is necessary to create and sustain truly meaningful human relationships.

HT: Brian Lowery at Preaching Today

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can his point, but I have been able to go deeper with a number of people, counseling and communicating and catching up. I can also find out needs more quickly than I would have otherwise, and try to meet them.

Jim Peet said...

Facebook is either a "a boon or bain". Use it wisely and it is a productive tool ... otherwise not.

We use Facebook to help communicate and organize activities for our church's young adult ministry.

From a personal use, I suggest: 1.) Setting permissions so that only friends or friends or friends can see profile information. 2.) Additionally I suggest NOT accepting the various "application add-ons" (like "pieces of flair", etc). These add-ons introduce security issues.

Jon from Bucksport said...

Facebook is the new whipping boy now that the old guys have worn themselves out beating up on blogging. Just like blogging they waited until it was HUGE before deciding it was devilish!
Facebook has allowed me to reconnect with people that I have lost track of for 15 years or more. It has allowed me to pray for them and see them grow and let them know of my struggles. Every form of communication is the same. It can be good; it can be bad but it can only be what we make it.

Anonymous said...

Great point, Buckster!

While I appreciate the sentiments, I wonder if people aren't taking things just a tad too seriously. Sometimes we need to lighten up a little bit. Believe it or not, not every single issue of life has to be deep beyond measure, totally serious, and sacrsanct to the point of weeping. There are better things in life to do than criticise people for putting "Buckthorn Bob is thinking of eating popcorn" on some silly little web site. Here's a suggestion for all the critics out there: If you don't like Facebook then don't use it! There. I just solved your problem. End of discussion. Believe me, there are actually real issues in life to be concerned over and we really don't need to feign some "heartfelt concern" that the lady down the street puts silly phrases like "I just caught 3 mice in Mousehunt" on her Facebook page.


The main problem I have with Facebook is that it's really run by the CIA and you are giving your complete profile to the government by doing so. If we want to talk about problems with Facebook, let's address this.