Facebook - a new community?

I have a Facebook page. But I have a shocking confession to make, I have never looked at it or used it since I set it up. That makes me quite unusual among Facebookers. But I have a nagging disquiet about such things - they are virtual community and they miss so many of the nuances and things we find so fulfilling about real community. Its like watching under 11s rugby instead of being at Twickenham seeing England play Scotland - it just can't measure up.

Josh Harris has recently been blogging on his experience with Facebook, here is what he had to say:

"For the past seven days I’ve really enjoyed Facebook. It is a lot fun and a great way to connect with people. I now understand why it’s so incredibly popular. But today I decided to bring my Facebook career to an abrupt end. I’m weird, huh? But here are some of the reasons I’m calling it quits.
First, I just don’t have enough self-control not to check my page constantly. In one week I saw what many of you warned me about: it’s addictive. I found myself tempted to update my “status” every five minutes. “Joshua Harris is walking across his office. Joshua Harris sitting in his office chair. Joshua Harris is wasting valuable time describing what he is doing” …
I don’t need another reason for staring at a computer screen. I’m constantly needing to evaluate how much time I spend emailing, browsing and blogging. Now obviously a lot of that activity is good, useful work. But sometimes it can be a time-waster. I think God’s been helping me improve at knowing when to unplug from cyberville and connect with the real, rich world of reality–playing with my kids, talking to my wife, taking a walk. Throwing Facebook in the mix of my online options is just a little too much for me right now.
The other reason I feel right about making my time with Facebook just a visit is a little harder to explain. How do I put this? I found that it encouraged me to think about me even more than I already do–which is admittedly already quite a bit. Does that make any sense? Without any help from the internet I’m inclined to give way too much time to evaluating myself, thinking about myself and wondering what other people think of me. If that egocentrism is a little flame, than Facebook for me is a gasoline IV feeding the fire. I need to grow in self-forgetfulness. I need to worry more about what God is thinking of me. I need to be preoccupied with what he’s written in his word, not what somebody just wrote on my “wall.”"

See the whole post here: http://www.joshharris.com/2007/08/my_one_and_only_week_on_facebo_1.php


We as Christians can make use of such a community for gospel purposes, indeed it is part of our being in the world but not of it, but only if we enter it with gospel intentions and be on our guard as the Bible constantly tells us to be.