Faceporn

Many of you may be aware of a little cultural phenomenon. This little phenomenon is a very good tool that allows us to communicate with and keep in touch with friends far away. It allows us to affilitate with each other in "groups" and to share our lives with each other through posting pictures and profiles that tell people more about us. This same good phenomenon can also be corrupted, just like anything else in this world, and become something bad, something pornographic.

This "little cultural" phenomenon that I speak of is of course:

Facebook!

Let me clarify what I just said. I am not saying that Facebook is bad. Facebook can be a very good thing, (as I evidenced above), but taken in the wrong context, it can become perverted, self centered, and a drug/ something that we do to get out "fix". When it comes to this point, Facebook use becomes pornographic.

The reality is that porn as we know it, is not really pornography. The way that we view that porn can make it pornography. Pornography is a perversion of a very good thing. In terms of sex, porn takes something that is, in the words of Andrew Rudd, "very emotional, relational, awkward, and messy" and removes all of those things leaving us with an empty shell that we can use to "get off".

So really, porn is anything that divorces us from the need for real relationships and allows us to distance ourselves from them. At the same time, it is an external abberation that allows us to "get our jollies off". It takes the place of a good urge that has been instilled in us by our creator and replaces it with a lonely and empy, but yet strangely pleasurable shell of that good thing.

Facebook can become porn in these ways:

1. When it is used suppress boredom- I know that I have been guilty of this as have many people. We are bored. So we get on Facebook. And then we stay on Facebook, for hours, and hours, and hours, and hours, and . . . I think you get the point. Our whole purpose of being on Facebook is not to socially connect with other human beings, it is to suppress our boredom. Just like people can turn to drugs, sex/pornography, alcohol, so also people can turn to Facebook to suppress boredom and escape reality. We can use Facebook to numb the ebbing of time and the consequences therfore of boredom.

2. When it is used as our only social context for relationships- We all know them. Our Facebook friends. The people who will talk back and forth to you on your wall, will reply to your notes, comment on your pictures, but never even say "hi" to you or give you the time of day in real life. When we write on someone's walls without intention of really caring about that person or finding out how they are and investing in their life, we're using it as a pornographic tool. We don't care about that person, we care that we made the effort and it makes us feel good. We're using it to elevate ourselves to elitism. It's like those people who get into social activism to "help people" but are really doing it as a feel good fix.

3. When we use it to assert our supremacy- I know that I have done this before as have many others. We write a note in order to "get out opinion out there". When someone comments back to us with a different view, we feel the need to "correct them." We may even pretend that their opinion changes ours, and feign the attitude that we care. This attitude of elitism is a pornographic use of Facebook. While we wouldn't dare assert our arrogance in this way in a normal cultural setting, Facebook gives us the perfect place. Safe, and divorced from the consequences of relationship. This is the same reason that a lot of people write books. To prove that they're right and that other people are wrong. (*cough* John Macarthur *cough*) When we use a tool to escape the consequences, the messiness, the awkwardness of dialogue in relationships, our use of that tool becomes pornographic.

I am not saying that there is even a limit as to how much people should use Facebook. That line can and should be drawn by the individual and not by a community of faith. I am saying however that we should evaluate our use of not just Facebook, but all texts, to see if we are using them pornographically. Are we using them in place of our relationships with others and with God? Is our use of these tools spurned out of a longing, but distancing from God? If so, we should try to cut out our pornographic use of texts and attempt to get back to right uses of these texts and to our relationships to God and to others.