Scotch College

Face to Face(book)Chaplain’s Column

Social networking is as old as the hills and just as natural. We have our families, friends, neighbours and colleagues whom we greet with a kiss, an embrace a handshake or just ‘Hi’. Crowds followed Jesus but he had a core team of 12 men, a small cluster of women supporters, and three men in his inner circle.

Social networks are being recast by today’s technologies. Digital mobile phones and 3G Internet combine to bring us previously unimaginable connectivity. Steven Johnson, writing in Time magazine, observes that when Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, was launching Blogger.com back in the 90s people worried about the threat to our attention span ‘with two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books’. Twitter is a ‘communications platform that limited participants to 140 characters’. Where will it end Johnson wonders? ‘Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood?’ Don’t we already have that! :-)

The media has brought to our attention instances of profoundly negative outcomes in the sphere of cyber bullying with alarming consequences in Victorian schools. More positively, recently I received on my mobile phone a YouTube invitation from Hugh Evans, former Young Australian of the Year. He invited me (and other young Australians!) to creatively respond with a return mobile phone video so that the MDGs, could be kept up to ‘our’ G8 politicians.

Within Scotch it is hard to find a student without a mobile phone. The feeling I get is that in School Twitter isn’t yet fully on the scene, and that Facebook is the social networking option of choice. In two of my classes I could count on one hand the number of boys without a Facebook account.

At King’s College London in 1944 C S Lewis gave an address titled The Inner Ring. He spoke of that longing which comes to each of us from time to time to belong in the circle of the initiated; to be an insider instead of an outsider, to be able to say ‘we’ rather than ‘they’. He credited this desire, along with eros and economics, of being the motivation for most human activity. Lewis suggests that the existence of the ‘ring’ itself is inevitable and morally neutral, however, the longing to be on the inside is dangerous.

He says, ‘Of all the passions the passion for the ‘inner ring’ is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.’

Recently I opened a Facebook account. I now have 32 ‘friends’. I have slowly been getting to know some of the issues related to having ‘Facebook friends’.

Most significant for me is the challenge of speaking at the same level of formality or intimacy to every ‘friend’, irrespective of whether I would, on encounter, usually greet them with a kiss, an embrace, a handshake or just a familiar ‘Hi’.

It may be that we reinvest in unmediated encounters and the facilitating technologies will settle into something less seductive. Lewis suggests as much when he observes that once on the inside of any ring ‘the old ring will now be only the drab background for your endeavour to enter the new one... the quest of the inner ring will break your hearts unless you break it.’

Only in the kingdom of God will we discover an inner ring where ‘God treats us all alike’ (Acts 10:34). Then we shall see ‘face to face’ (1 Corinthians 13:12).

Graham Bradbeer