(Non-Theological) Reflections on Facebook

I worked at a Boy Scout camp (Camp Minsi) for a long, long time and a number of us have stayed in touch. About a week ago, one of us (Mike Roberts, on our Yahoogroup) suggested that everyone get a Facebook page as a number of Post and Camp alums were showing up there.

I hate faddish things. Popular, shallow, trendy, pop-culture, in-group things... like Facebook.

But, based on Rev. Mike's big thumbs-up, I figured, hey, why not?

So I created a Facebook page. Took about 15 minutes.

Suddenly, pictures of friends I'd lost contact with for years, if not decades, before started popping up on my screen like freakin' mushrooms after an overnight rain.

And I began re-establishing contact. (I have a strange ability to do this anyway. I can pick someone I've not talked to in 20 years, call them up out of the blue and say, 'what's up?' like we just got together last week.)

And I've been strangely hooked on this over the past week or so.

And of course, ruining it, I then had to go and over-interpret the experience :-)

The way I figure it, it's like this.

You look in a phone book and you see a name, an address and a phone number.

You look at most web pages and you see things like current status of one's life, movies, books that one is interested in, what jobs they have, etc.

Facebook has all that but it is a true database - it relates the information to other people the person knows.

So you see people's friends and you see their interests and community involvements, etc., etc., and all of it is hyperlinked so you really begin to see a person not just as a discrete unit but as a node in an ever-expanding interpersonal network of interests, relationships, commitments, beliefs and so on.

And you begin to see how a person's life history is bound up in the life histories of the significant people in his life over long periods of time.

Case in point. I vaguely recognized the name of a Boy Scout who had been maybe twelve or thirteen when I last worked on camp staff in the mid-90's. I didn't know him very well, but he was the staff groupie or, maybe, staff posse. He'd always show up on the dining hall porch before a meal and share with the staff what was going on in his troop, offer to play his bugle for some camp event, ask us about what was going on, etc.

Just a nice, clean-cut, idealistic kid who, just a bit, hero-worshiped the staff. (Ah, we were not worthy, but it was nice nonetheless :-) )

Anyway, his name popped up in the "fan of Camp Minsi" category and I vaguely recognized it and, more definitively, his photo and I hit the "add as friend" button.

As we re-connected, I got to see a bit of his current life, his friends, the ultrasound of the soon-to-be newest member of his growing family and I thought to myself, 'maybe, just maybe, when all us staff types were up there messing around and getting drunk on the weekends and running muck hikes and fridged froggies and singing silly songs in the dining hall and doing stupid skits at the campfire and ruining perfectly good food in the Scoutcraft cooking campfires maybe, just maybe, we made some small positive contribution to this kid's character.'

In spite of ourselves, no doubt :-)

Now all of this would have been true without Facebook but Facebook makes this network of personal interests, relationships and commitments over time a bit more tangible.

It will be interesting to see where this leads.