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Author worries online communities hurt real ones
Nancy Haught, Religion News Service
January 29, 2010
4 MIN READ TIME

Author worries online communities hurt real ones

Author worries online communities hurt real ones
Nancy Haught, Religion News Service
January 29, 2010

PORTLAND, Ore. — When it

comes to Facebook, Jesse Rice sees an immensely popular social networking site

that’s great for sharing photos and keeping in touch with friends.

He also sees something that

encourages attitudes and behaviors that don’t work as well in real life.

Rice, 37, is the author of

The Church of Facebook: How the Hyperconnected Are Redefining Community. A

former worship leader an evangelical megachurch in California, he has degrees

in organizational communication and counseling/psychology and — just as

important to his readers — a sense of humor.

On a video he uploaded to

YouTube, he explains his credentials for writing the book. “I can look at

various parts of an organization, at the flow of communication back and forth

within the independent structure, and I can identify all the ways that it’s

your parents’ fault,” he quips.

And “I have an actual

Facebook account with well over 100 friends.” Yes, he acknowledges that some

people have 6 million fans on a Facebook fan page.

“But, back off, Vin Diesel,”

he snarls. “It is possible to be too fast and too furious.”

Actually, being too fast to

judge others and too furious to write a well-considered post are two ways

Facebook thwarts meaningful community, according to Rice, who argues that

Facebook redefines the term altogether.

“Our definition of community

has shifted,” he says. “Now it’s a continuum, with 10 being your best friend

and 1 being people you just sort of bump into online. But it’s all community.”

RNS photo by Faith Cathcart/The Oregonian

Jesse Rice of Portland, Ore., is the author of The Church of Facebook: How the Hyperconnected Are Redefining Community.

Facebook has its bashers,

especially in Christian circles. While some believers say they find genuine

community online, others insist that face-to-face interaction is essential to a

life of faith.

Some users find satisfaction in building and sharing their

profiles, but others worry that Facebook breeds an all-about-me attitude and is

eroding the capacity to listen and empathize.

In broad strokes and funny

asides, Rice creates a context for Facebook and connects it to Christian

experience. It’s too early to tell how the book will do, Pape says, but sales

have surpassed 5,000 copies and the publisher’s preparing a second printing.

Rice, who admits he had an

early crush on Facebook, says he and the social networking site are just living

together now, although he expects the relationship to last. Launched in 2004,

Facebook has more than 350 million users, and more are joining all the time.

“Facebook has become part of

our lives,” he says. “And we’re just beginning to learn how to be human in it.

Rice has seen people give up

on “embodied relationships” because they feel freer on Facebook. “People do

argue that there’s a richness to relationships online,” he says. But it could

be that they don’t know what they’re missing. “We don’t feel that hunger

anymore.”

Rice figures his readers —

he also blogs at http://churchoffacebook.com

are mostly pastors and parents wondering how Facebook fits into the lives of

people they care about.

In a little more than 200

pages, Rice recounts the brief history of Facebook and compares it to other

technological achievements that have transformed modern life: Air conditioning,

for example, changed where and how Americans lived, ate, worked and spent their

leisure time. Facebook shows signs of doing the same.

But Rice draws on his

counseling experience to argue that prolonged hyperconnectivity shortens

attention spans; that fear of missing out tethers people to technology and

undermines their sense of control; that creating a Facebook profile turns some

people into celebrities and their friends into an entourage or audience.

While he still has concerns,

Rice says Facebook in many ways is just the latest version of an age-old

concern.

“Whatever technology that’s

in front of us always challenges us,” he says. “Our parents thought we listened

to the radio too much.”

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Haught

writes for The Oregonian.)