About-Facebook

So I got "unfriended" today on Facebook. It was kind of an odd experience. I think what was particularly odd about it was that it was in the middle of a political discussion, and the person who unfriended me is someone that I find myself frequently in agreement with regarding political matters.

The place where we most certainly do not agree is in the area of religion. As I'm sure just about anyone knows, I'm a Christian. My former Facebook friend (FFF) is an agnostic, and a pretty hard-core one. Even though it was a political discussion going on with no perceptible religious undertones, my FFF took a moment to imply that my religion was a big part of the problem.

I'm having a hard time relating the story without simply copying and pasting the discussion here, but I think it's an important story nonetheless, because it largely defines the kind of person I am on a broader scale than just calling me a politically liberal Christian. See, my FFF implied that those people involved in the conversation that weren't liberals simply weren't worth the time having a political discussion with, and I disagreed. So he said he just had to unfriend me because he'd had enough of the "bullshit" that my religion was bringing on me.

I'm thinking that, given the context, he wasn't just talking about religion. Not really. After all, I'm even less of a preachy person outside of my blogging. I think the thing he had a problem with is the fact that so many of my Christian friends are (as Christians tend to be) very conservative. Yeah, he essentially said that he hates religion, but knowing him, (and I've known him IRL for over 20 years) I think the thing that really bothers him about Christianity is that so many Christians are conservative. If we all agreed with his political views and just happened to also believe in God, I'm sure he'd find Christians much more palatable. (Heck, he's put up with me just fine, so that's something, right?)

I know it's difficult to put up with people whose views you don't agree with, but this is where I know I also depart from his view, and this is the thing that, as I said, defines me as a person. I feel that shutting people out of my life because I disagree with them is just going to make the quality of my life (and maybe theirs) poorer. Just because I'm a Christian, I'm not going to forsake all my pagan, atheist, and agnostic friends. Just because I'm a Democrat doesn't mean I'm going to hate my Republican and Libertarian friends. Just because I love America doesn't mean I'm going to ignore anyone who lives outside of this country. I just believe that there's a fullness of life that you get from interacting with people whose viewpoints have the potential of broadening your own. If you only expend your time on people who have the same views as you, how will you ever learn anything new?

I guess I accept that my FFF may simply be dealing with anger issues (he also hinted at that) and just felt it was something he had to do for his sanity, but still, isn't there an easier way to deal with such things than cutting off your friends?

Facing the truth

I suppose I ought to file a followup report, so to speak. I decided to break down and finally join Facebook.

I gotta say, it's been fun. I just signed up less than two days ago, and I already have 51 "friends". Now, none of these people are strangers, but admittedly a few of them are people that I probably wouldn't have shed a tear over not getting to contact again someday. (I won't mention who, just in case someone comes to read this and gets their feelings hurt; not that I think it's likely many of them care so much either.)

It's been eventful, too, not just "friendful" if I may coin the term. I recontacted an old friend I haven't seen in nearly 20 years who just happened to join the day before I did. I found out another old friend just got engaged. I had another friend about whom I was thinking "I wonder if this person is still friends with so-and-so," to immediately find that "so-and-so" had just sent me a friend request. And the cherry on top was probably connecting to an old friend whose immediate action upon "friending" me was to post an 18-year-old picture of me with a condom on my head.

Actually, there were certain things that are interesting in a more cerebral way. One friend pointed me to a tool that would map how my "friends" were "friends" of each other, revealing that although everyone seemed to be immediately connected, in fact I seemed to have two or three "clusters" of friends: people from my the town where I grew up, and people from a place where I used to work and my church. It was interesting to think about how looking at specifically the "friends" that I have, those clusters seemed to form, and I suspect that many other people would also find their "friends" forming into the same sort of clusters, and yet while clustering is no doubt common, if one were to look at the whole community of Facebook in a relational diagram, the fact that everyone belongs to various peoples' clusters in different ways implies that the overall effect would be more difficult to show in a diagram than the structure of this massive run-on sentence you're reading.

Of course, such thought, along with others made me think about the whole "six degrees of separation" concept (One of Will Smith's early movies, and very good!) and how Facebook plays into that. There was actually a "six degrees of separation" group that one could join, the purpose of which was to see if everyone in Facebook was connected in such a manner. I actually don't doubt it after the small taste I had, or at least that something like, say, 98% of Facebook members with at least two friends are part of the same interconnected mass of digital humanity. Really, there's something interesting about the way it works as an experiment in social dynamics.

As well as everyone being there, it seemed as well like every thing was there. The six degrees group was just one of thousands. I thought I'd join a group of fans of the show "House, M.D." and found myself wondering which one of the dozens there were to join. Any television show, any movie, any book, any celebrity or other pop culture phenomenon in the world probably has a fan club on Facebook. (Yes, they have a fan club for gay penguins, I checked.)

Now, do I feel more connected? Yeah, a little. I'd still rather spend time with my wife and kids, though.