About Face
Why I’m Not on Facebook: An Open Letter to Christian College Students
by Steve Baarendse
Recently I visited an old college friend. He said half-jokingly that it was his mission in life to get me onto Facebook, so we spent some time scrolling through a list of our mutual friends on his iPhone. He made a valiant effort to convert me, and I must say it was tempting, but I remain a Facebook conscientious objector. This put me to thinking: Why am I so reluctant to open a Facebook account, when one out of eight people on this planet has seen the benefits of joining the world’s largest circle of friends?
To begin, three disclaimers: (1) You’re about to read the comments of a Facebook outsider. If you’re a Facebook fan, you’ll probably find some of them quaintly naïve. (2) I don’t pretend to treat this subject objectively. I’m “throwing the book” at Facebook. I make my arguments as pointed as possible, not because I’m angry, but because, like Chesterton, I find the quick rapier thrust to provoke the most vigorous response in the shortest space. I also think we have a major problem on our hands and that the cautionary view about Facebook hasn’t been sufficiently heard. (3) I’m neither against friendship nor opposed to the many ways technology helps make life easier today. I think of myself as a social being made in the image of a communicating, social Creator, and I’m grateful to write these thoughts on a laptop.
When I told a student in our college cafeteria that I was thinking about writing “Ten Reasons Why I’m Not on Facebook,” he shot back, “And I’m on Facebook for ten other reasons!” We shared a good chuckle, because we can agree that Facebook has many advantages: It’s a handy self-updating address book and photo album; it reunites us with long-lost friends; it’s a lifeline for missionaries whose support network spans the globe; it has given oppressed people a voice amid social chaos, and so on. I can see how many people today find Facebook so helpful they can no longer imagine life without it.
But the truth is that, as recently as eight years ago, before the 850 million users, when some of you were 11-to-12-year-old “tweens,” no one could imagine life with Facebook, because it hadn’t been invented yet. And amazingly, people back in those pre-Facebook Dark Ages were living happy, fulfilled lives. Though it may be hard to believe, they even communicated with their friends.
My apologies to that student in the cafeteria: the list of reasons has now grown from ten to a baker’s dozen.
1. The Unfriend
Facebook has inflated the definition of friendship and thus devalued it. A friend used to be solid currency you could bank on: David and Jonathan, John Newton and William Cowper, John and Abigail Adams, Lewis and Tolkien. Diana is Anne Shirley’s bosom friend; Hopeful comforts Christian in Doubting Castle and lifts his face above the icy waters of the Jordan. In Facebook’s world, friend has come to mean casual acquaintance.
Facebook could only have been dreamt up in America, this land of the instant smile and handshake. My parents were missionaries in Austria. If, after ten years of ministry there, you had five friends, you were most fortunate, because they’d be friends for life. On Facebook, you might have 500 “friends” and not one true friend. You can friend or, in bizarre Orwellian Newspeak, unfriend at a click. (Unfriend was the Oxford Dictionary’s 2009 Word of the Year.) Worse yet, you can be unfriended without even so much as a “Dear John.” One stroke of the index finger and you’re zapped off the board. The casual fluidity of such things is distressing: it’s a brave new world of instant coupling and uncoupling, all from the safety of distance.
The recent movie No Strings Attached actually had the gall to celebrate the kind of dehumanized promiscuity—known in popular lingo as “friends with benefits”—that Huxley portrayed so chillingly in Brave New World. Facebook has downgraded the meaning of friendship; its ranking system of “inner” and “outer” circles has needlessly provoked envy and hurt. The Bible’s definition is stronger: “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity” (Prov. 17:17).
Steve Baarendse is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Columbia International University in Columbia, South Carolina. He and his wife Sara have three children and worship at Lexington Presbyterian Church (PCA).
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