In 2011, CNN.com published an article discussing evangelical outrage to a recent Arkansas court decision allowing homosexual couples to adopt children. The author highlighted the fact that while evangelical leaders adamantly opposed gay adoption as a plausible solution for the lack of U.S. adoption homes, they neglected to take up the cause themselves. “They underscore the way many Christians denounce a social problem that they have no plan for solving.” The author proposed that if only one in every 138 Southern Baptists adopted one of the 116,000 foster children waiting to be adopted in the United States, they could completely alleviate the need for homosexual adoption.1 The author’s opinion is clear: stop critiquing from the sidelines and get involved in the solution.
Recently, technological advancements in communication and their effects on relationships and culture have encountered similar critique. There is no doubt that innovations such as the Internet and wireless communication devices have exponentially improved the capability of an individual to communicate with those who are far away.2 However, some complain that the same technology has alienated people from those in their immediate geographic location.3
In many cases, Facebook lies at the center of these debates. A plethora of journal and magazine articles have been published in the last few years raising questions on the psychological and relational side effects of regular Facebook use. Other works have recently popped up where everyone from academics, to parents, to pastors have explained why they are not “on Facebook,” citing a wide range of assumed correlations between Facebook use and negative social behavior.
However, very little has been published on how to use Facebook in the most responsible, least hazardous ways. Or perhaps the more pressing question is how to instruct younger generations, prone to irresponsible behavior, in responsible Facebook use. Instead, the majority of current critique has a tone of lamenting the good ol’ days.”
One particular piece appeared in the May/June 2012 issue of Touchstone. “About Face: Why I’m Not on Facebook: An Open Letter to Christian College Students,” by Dr. Steve Baarendse, explains 13 reasons why this Presbyterian associate professor at Columbia International University has chosen not to participate in Facebook. Admitting that his purpose is not to dissuade students from using Facebook but to encourage discussion regarding responsible use of the social networking site, Baarendse makes some great points illustrating how using Facebook contrary to its design or with a lack of self-discipline can multiply an individual’s existing problems with self-esteem, narcissism, etc.4
Sprinkled throughout the valid critiques of online social interaction, the reader also senses the author’s longing for the cultural norms of old. This is exemplified most clearly in his conclusion, comparing the social interaction of college students today to that of Oxford University in the time of Lewis and Tolkien.
“If Oxford’s halls had been rigged with Wi-Fi, and Facebook sixty years ago, would we have Narnia or Middle Earth? Lewis and Tolkien had a wonderful social network: the Inklings. They had a chat room: the Eagle and Child, where you could run your finger along the wood grain of the benches, hear the tinkle of cutlery, smell the smoke from Jack’s pipe, and catch an elfin twinkle in Tolkien’s eye as he clears his throat and reads: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ The Inklings were real friends with real faces discussing real books. Is it wrong to lament a human loss here?”5
Yet the fact is that the center of social interaction today is Facebook, and this does not appear to be changing anytime soon. In a 2010 article celebrating Facebook’s position at the top of Fast Company‘s “Top-Ten List of Innovative Companies,” journalist Ellen McGirt recorded the excitement of the Facebook team at reaching their goal of 350 million active monthly users in December 2009. While the company was overjoyed at the success of their site in only six years, they couldn’t help but look forward and dream about joining the ranks of the industry leader, Google, then with 800 million regular users.6 Only three years later, in October 2012, the Facebook team far surpassed its earlier goal with one billion active monthly users.7
There is no doubt that Baarendse and other writers are correct in claiming that Facebook is a social networking tool with enormous potential for harm, but the Christian academic community cannot afford to bury its head in the sand—pretending that Facebook is a passing fad—and continue to condemn the social site from the sidelines. What the “Net Generation”8 needs is experienced, responsible, spiritually mature academics who will show them how to use social technology such as Facebook in responsible, spiritually enhancing ways. It needs Christian leaders to stop critiquing from the sidelines and get involved in the solutions.
The Need for Responsible Facebook Use
Almost every product, these days, comes with guidelines for responsible use. Even the 2012 Christmas toy favorite, “Nerf N-Strike Elite Hail Fire” comes with directions for safe use, “CAUTION: Do not NOT aim at eyes or face.”9 Anything with both value and also with the potential to do harm to the user or another individual is in need of directions for responsible use. Facebook has both.
The Value of Facebook
It is difficult to deny the value of Facebook, especially within the limits of its design. In the mind of Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, the site always has been about enhancing existing relationships.10 In fact, the site’s “friend” network—a concept that receives consistent criticism for its tendency to blur acquaintance/friend lines11—is intended to facilitate interaction between those whose relationships extend to the physical world.
For instance, Jessica Northcutt (my wife) is a stay-at-home mother in a rural area of western Kentucky. With three children to occupy the majority of her time and few local social hubs, Jessica sees most of her friends face-to-face only once per week. However, commenting on photos and status updates helps Jessica have more active relationships with her friends than would be possible with face-to-face interaction only.
Another Facebook user, Casey Northcutt (my sister), served with the International Mission Board in southeast Asia for two years. While Casey’s Facebook activity was greatly limited by security concerns, she was able to keep up to date regarding the activity of her family and friends despite her geographic location on the opposite side of the globe.
The real genius of Facebook, however, lies not in its ability to enhance individual relationships but to do so with groups of users. The “Groups” function of Facebook allows sub-networks of individuals to disseminate information efficiently and build upon each other’s text-based interaction. Whether it be a Sunday School class sharing moment-by-moment prayer updates or a Bible study leader sending out preliminary discussion questions, Facebook facilitates group interaction regardless of geographic distance.
The site also utilizes the interrelated networks of users to make grassroots information dispersal both efficient and highly effective. After the April 2007 shooting on the campus of Virginia Tech, one university student created “‘VT Unite,’ a Facebook group that offered students a place to grieve—and to show solidarity—in the wake of the day’s deadly massacre.” In less than 24 hours, the group had more than 5,000 members.12
In 2009, another young Facebook user started the group “One Million Voices Against FARC” as a protest against the Columbian revolutionary group that had terrorized the nation’s citizens for years. Within six hours the group had fifteen hundred members. In less than 24 hours, it had grown to four thousand members. And one month later, the Facebook group organized a march against FARC that included more than 10 million Columbian citizens.13
Potential Negative Side Effects of Facebook Use
Academic and professional publication has been warning the public of the potential hazards that accompany online interaction—particularly Facebook use—for the past several years. While this article cannot list, much less discuss, all of these, many of them tend to be manifestations of what psychologists call the Online Disinhibition Effect.
While the lessening of social inhibitions online is not always perceived as negative, it often results in what John Suler, in his seminal article, refers to as “toxic disinhibition,” participating in rude language, harsh criticism, expressions of anger, threats, or worse.14 Harmful expressions of this phenomenon abound in recent literature.
Baarendse, for instance, discusses how the “invisibility”15 of Facebook causes user interaction to occur a step away from reality and a step toward a “high tech version of the shadow-play in Plato’s Cave.” Baarendse cautions Christian college students that constant interaction in this make-believe world could dull the pleasures of reality.16
Baarendse also describes the Facebook user’s proclivity toward narcissism, “The temptation for self-promotion is inexhaustible: we construct a personal profile that would please an ad agency; we post witticisms and breathlessly await our courtiers’ adulations.”17 Rev. Kae Evensen illustrates the same phenomenon in an article in Word World where she recounts seeing an especially beautiful Facebook photo of a teenage friend of her daughter only to be informed that it had been “Photoshopped.”18
Suler describes six elements of online interaction that contribute to disinhibition,19 but two of the most prevalent and most hazardous are “dissociative anonymity” and “solipsistic introjection.” Anonymity, while being difficult—but not impossible—to achieve on Facebook, greatly affects online social interaction overall. “Whatever they say or do can’t be directly linked to the rest of their lives…they don’t have to own their behavior by acknowledging it within the full context of an integrated online/offline identity.”20
Website administrators and moderators refer to online users who allow anonymity to result in toxic disinhibition as “trolls.”21 Sarah Bee, a journalist and formerly a moderator for an online forum called “The Register,” describes how trolls would occasionally get so offensive that it warranted an email from Bee requesting that the user tone it down. “Most people were incredibly contrite when contacted. It was like they had forgotten who they were. ‘They would send messages back saying, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry’, not even using the excuse of having a bad day or anything like that.'”22
The lack of significant responsibility inherent in online anonymity occasionally breaches not only lines of etiquette but federal laws as well. In the spring of 2012, British national, Nicola Brookes launched a legal suit against Facebook on account of a group of trolls who viciously harassed her on the site, even going so far as to open a fraudulent Facebook account under her name and sending lewd messages to minors.23
Facebook’s policy guidelines clearly prohibit opening an account as someone else,24 and they commonly close such accounts when made aware of them; but Brookes’ suit went a step further, demanding that Facebook release contact information for those that opened the fraudulent account.25 The British Parliament, in an effort to reduce the disinhibiting effects of online anonymity, has even discussed legislation giving social websites protection against liability for trolls so long as they provide victims with information on their abusers.26
In addition to dissociative anonymity, solipsistic introjection is a second element in online disinhibition with a broad range of side effects. Solipsistic introjection is the tendency to take text-based communication and fill in the non-verbal gaps with voices and visual images from within one’s own mind. “The online companion then becomes a character within one’s intrapsychic world, a character shaped partly by how the person actually presents him or herself via text communication, but also by one’s internal representational system based on personal expectations, wishes, and needs.”27
In illustrating this phenomenon, Evensen uses a sub-plot from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. After only a short run-in with the dashing Mr. Willoughby, Marianne begins a long distance relationship via the writing and receiving of letters, through which she quickly falls in love. Apparently, however, the “Mr. Willoughby” in Marianne’s imagination was far removed from Willoughby’s true character. This fact is made clear when he disregards the young woman at their next meeting.28
In Austen’s novel, the solipsistic introjection involved only one party in the relationship. However, in many online relationships today, this phenomenon leads both parties from casual interaction to “emotional adultery.”29
According to a recent survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, one in five divorces somehow involves interaction on Facebook.30 Baarendse comments on the ramifications of introjection in online interaction recounting the policy of Billy Graham that he never counseled women behind closed doors. Baarendse follows by rhetorically inquiring, “But how can we ‘keep the doors open’ on Facebook?”31
At times, these elements of online disinhibition even work together to create toxic phenomena. Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost captured a modern version of Sense and Sensibility in the 2010 documentary Catfish, where Schulman’s brother begins a cross-country relationship with a girl he meets online. After getting to know the girl, her mother, and her little sister, he takes a trip to visit the girl in person, only to discover that all three individuals were really imagined personas of the mother. The dissociative anonymity of the online relationship allowed the woman to create and develop the characters. At the same time, solipsistic introjection caused the young man to imagine the “girl” as he wanted her to be.32
Conclusion
After describing his six elements that contribute to the Online Disinhibition Effect, Suler theorizes the phenomenon is not caused by an abnormal, “deeper self” being released by the disinhibiting effects of online interaction but that the “self” expressed in toxic disinhibition is as much a part of the individual as the “self” expressed in the physical world.
“The self does not exist separate from the environment in which that self is expressed. If someone contains his aggression in face-to-face living, but expresses that aggression online, both behaviors reflect aspects of self: the self that acts nonaggressively under certain conditions [and] acts aggressively under other conditions. When a person is shy in person while outgoing online, neither self-presentation is more true. They are two dimensions of that person, each revealed within a different situational context.”33
Following Suler’s logic, the phenomena observable as toxic disinhibition would really be the normal expression of the individual self within the specific environmental aspects of any particular online context, and the way to mitigate such behavior would be to modify the nature of online environments. Suler hints to this in his conclusion, “Different modalities of online communication (e.g., e-mail, chat, video) and different environments (e.g., social, vocational, fantasy) may facilitate diverse expressions of self.”34
Christian theologian, Millard Erickson, describes a very different, biblical picture of general psychosocial interaction and the proper method of its management.
“If we feel that humanity is basically good or, at worst, morally neutral, we will view the problems of society as stemming from an unwholesome environment. Alter the environment, and changes in individual humans and their behavior will follow. If, on the other hand, the problems of society are rooted in radically perverted human minds and wills, then the nature of those individuals will have to be altered, or they will continue to infect the whole.”35 (p. 581)
Following Erickson’s interpretation of passages such as
As Facebook and other networks continue to affect more and more of the population, the need for critique will be even greater than it is now, but the way in which Christian scholarship goes about this critique must change. No longer can it be considered sufficient for writers to criticize the negative social behavior catalyzed by Facebook use without proposing how one might work toward mitigating such behavior.
The topics for such constructive work vary as widely as do the ways in which Facebook can be misused. Not only are there a multitude of manifestations within the Online Disinhibition Effect, there is also the tendency of users to temporally withdraw from face-to-face interaction in favor of going online. Other negative side effects include the tendency of some Facebook users to experience a form of separation anxiety when unable to log on for extended periods or the online voyeurism observed when users invest emotional stock in Facebook post-conversations that do not involve them.
The potential topics are near endless, but whatever the topic, Christian scholars and writers need to face the fact that online social networking is a modern reality. Christian leaders need to transition from critiquing the faults of Facebook as reasons to reject the whole system and begin to prayerfully and responsibly get involved in the solutions.
Bibliography
1 Jason Locy, “My Take: On Adoption, Christians Should Put up or Shut Up,” CNN: Belief Blog (2011).
2 Sharon Jayson, “2010: The Year Technology Replaced Talking,” USA Today (2010).
3 Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” Atlantic Magazine 309, no. 4 (2012).
4 Steve Baarendse, “About Face: Why I’m Not on Facebook: An Open Letter to Christian College Students,” Touchstone: Journal of Mere Christianity 25, no. 3 (2012).
5 Ibid.
6 McGirt, “#1 Facebook,” Fast Company (2012).
7 Facebook, “Newsroom,” Facebook.
8 Don Tapscott, Grown up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009), 2.
9 “Nerf N-Strike Elite Hail-Fire,” Hasbro.
10 David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon Schuster, 2010), 12.
11 Baarendse, “About Face,” 45.
12 Brock Read, “Virginia Tech Student’s Facebook Group Offers a Way to Grieve,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (2007).
13 Kirkpatrick, 1-3.
14 John Suler, “The Online Disinhibition Effect,” CyberPsychology Behavior 7, no. 3 (2004): 321.
15 Ibid., 322.
16 Baarendse, “About Face,” 45.
17 Ibid., 47.
18 Kae Evensen, “Pastor on Facebook? Not for Me,” Word World 30, no. 3 (2010): 331.
19 Suler, “The Online Disinhibition Effect.”
20 Ibid., 322.
21 NetLingo, s.v. “Troll: A.K.A. Trolling.”
22 Tim Adams, “How the Internet Created an Age of Rage,” The Observer (2011).
23 Josie Ensor, “Woman Launches Legal Action to Identify Facebook Trolls,” The Daily Telegraph (2012).
24 Facebook, “Statements of Rights and Responsibilities,” Facebook.
25 Ensor.
26 James Slack, “The Unmasking of Internet Trolls: New Laws Will Make Websites Responsible for Vile Messages Unless They Reveal Identities of Bullies,” Daily Mail (2012).
27 Suler, “The Online Disinhibition Effect,” 323.
28 Evensen, “Pastor on Facebook?,” 329.
29 Baarendse, “About Face,” 47.
30 Natasha Burton, “Facebook Divorce: Will Facebook Ipo Create Surge of Silicon Valley Divorces?,” The Huffington Post (2011).
31 Baarendse, “About Face,” 47.
32 Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, Catfish, (Universal Pictures, 2010).
33 Suler, “The Online Disinhibition Effect,” 325.
34 Ibid.
35 Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998), 581.
