The archbishop's take on social media
August 6th 2009 23:28
Internet social networking sites which promote themselves as communities are in fact undermining community life. So are texting and emails.
So says Archbishop Vincent Nichols, leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales.
Archbishop Nichols singled out MySpace and Facebook, and said they had led young people to seek "transient" friendships, with quantity becoming more important than quality. These sites, he said, leave young people unable to cope when their social networks collapse. The internet and mobile phones, he said, were "dehumanising" community life. Social networking sites, he said, were a "key factor" in suicide among young people.
"Friendship is not a commodity," Archbishop Nichols said. Society was losing some of its ability to build communities through inter-personal communication, as the result of excessive use of texts and emails rather than face-to-face meetings or telephone conversations.
Is he right?
If he is right, there is a fundamental difference in relationships built with and without face-to-face or, at least, live voice interaction. Archbishop Nichols is claiming this fundamental difference exists, that relationships built without seeing the body language or hearing voice inflections of the other party are relationships somehow built on less firm foundations.
Obviously these immediate signals are valuable aids in the process of getting to know people. If someone claims they are tall, it helps to test the claim if you are looking at them at the time. If someone claims they are calm, and yet their voice reveals a tension within, we have immediate evidence of something insecure.
Real relationships, however, are not built in a day, and they should not be determined by a person's height or equanimity. Firm relationships are built on an attraction of personality and on an appreciation of values. They take time and your best guide is and always has been instinct. You can be fooled by a person 10 inches away as much as by a person 10 time zones away.
The claim that the failure of a teenage friendship formed on a social networking site is more likely to trigger suicidal tendencies is particularly debatable. This sad possibility is about the state of mind of a person unable to cope with the breakdown of a friendship, a support structure, a statement of social acceptability. Archbishop Nichols in effect claims that the ensuing feelings of isolation and desolation are more potent when the relationship was formed on a social newtorking site than, say, in a coffee shop or a school playground. Yet he gives no evidence for this claim.
Perhaps no evidence exists.
Bullying can occur through Facebook and MySpace networks, and someone even now is probably working out how to do it through Twitter. Bullying, however, was and remains a problem in any space where people gather, either physically or internetly.
Archbishop Nichols offers no suggestions and no solutions. Does he want social networking sites banned? Are we to forbid our children from mobile phones and texting? No way — the kids will just permanently take over the house phone again.
Social networking sites are not a microcosm of real life; they are not a poor cousin of real life; they are not even a reflection of real life. They are real life, and the friendships formed through them are no less a commodity then friendships formed elsewhere.
The rules may vary slightly, but that is nothing new. We assume Archbishop Nicholl was once a boy with a passing interest in girls. We assume he was sometimes introduced to girls by his parents. We also assume he sometimes met them in a quiet corner of the school playground, or perhaps even behind the bicycle shed — a different scenario with a slightly different set of rules, but with the same potential to form an enduring relationship.
In the event of an ensuing close friendship breaking down, which one would have evoked the stronger tendency to suicide?
www.telegraph.co.uk
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