Or Maybe Not.
These days, a lot of rental cars come with GPS navigation systems. I think that’s a perfect marriage of need and function. One of my favorite aspects of these systems is the calm way they inform you that you’ve missed your turn, even after they’ve given you an advance warning every 100 yards or so. When they have every right to ask “What, do you need me to turn the steering wheel for you, too?” the system tells you in a soothing, measured voice: “Recalculating your position.”
That’s in a sense what this post is. I launched into this series with a fairly minimal roadmap for where I wanted to go, and I think I’ve already overshot my mark a bit.
In yesterday’s post, I talked about the potential for this site and others like it in this interactive medium to become communities, inasmuch as they offer at their core the possibility of a vital, extended conversation. I also looked at some of the ways this conversation naturally breaks down.
I had a definite place I was going with all of this, but as I reconsidered that post throughout the day, the one question I kept coming back to is whether community is even possible in this setting.
On one level, it seems like quite a stretch to even think about using a word like that. Real community, much less one that could even be remotely described as “grace-filled,” requires its members to have a tangible presence in each other’s lives, a presence that almost certainly requires physical proximity. Right? I mean, a loose affiliation of glorified discussions can certainly be enjoyable and meaningful if you want it to be, but does it a community make? Or perhaps a more interesting question might be: can it a community make?
I think the most truthful answer I can give at this point is, simply, I don’t know.
Perhaps it’s an aspiration at best, something devoutly to be wished. Or maybe it’s enough that the discussions we have ripple out to affect those real communities that we are a part of.
Anyhow, I think I’m going to recalibrate my language a bit and take up the rest of that discussion soon. Instead of talking about what kind of community we want to be, I think I’ll talk more about what kind of people we want to be and how we can conduct our conversations in a way that avoids some of the natural pitfalls of this medium. And maybe the trajectory I talked about yesterday can point us toward transformative conversation, which is still a worthy destination.
(One more thing, as long as I’m rambling incoherently about semantics. I recognize that everyone has his or her own reasons for participating in a forum like this, and that it would be pretty presumptuous to say that I could speak for anyone but myself. So when I say things like ”we should be like X” or ”we should do Y,” please understand that I’m really talking about myself, but including an implicit invitation for you to join me on this journey.)
Okay. Enough babbling. More later.
2 Ripples from “Or Maybe Not.”
Jim says:
August 17, 2005 at 8:08 pm
I don’t think you’re babbling. I think you’re on to something. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.ericsiegmund.com/fireant">Eric</a> said something in a post a while back about how people you’ve only engaged with through their written words and thoughts can actually come to matter to you. You think of them as, well, friends. Yes, friends.
Friendship is a lost art. What I mean is, I think we may have lost the meaning of friendship as we’ve become less civil in our discussions. Eric, for example, is pretty conservative politically. Every once in a while he lets fly with a post that is decidedly, unapologetically conservative. Now, I’m no conservative but I’ve associated with conservatives for years (my old church was as conservative as the current one is liberal). I think of Eric as a friend though I’ve never met him in the flesh and even though I find myself unable to agree (note that language) with some of the positions he takes. Of course, I could say the same thing about some of the politcally liberal bloggers I read as well. I’m no liberal either. Mostly I’m confused.
But this isn’t about politics. This is about something infinitely more important: friendship. We’ve (When I say “we...") inverted the priority here. We think of friends as people who are like minded. Since when was that the definition of a friend? You actually said it better when you wrote:
“we’re overwhelmingly tempted to pick a side, surround ourselves with likeminded allies, and start firing away at those who disagree with us.”
But then there’s Jesus saying, “I have called you friends.” Which I think ouches just as much as the quotes you cited from Dark in the last post. And there’s the root of friendship. Jesus, whether you believe him to be who he claimed or not, called people friends who scorned and cursed him. Some of them turned their lives around. Some didn’t. But that didn’t stop him.
Well, this is too long already. I think I may have exceeded the length of the post this is attached too, so I’ll shut up. After I say: Regain the art (the discipline, the practice) of friendship and you regain community.
zalm says:
August 18, 2005 at 4:08 pm
Heh. My sister called me out on the babbling line, too. I believe her words were along the lines of “that’s not babbling. that’s being vulnerable. there’s a difference.”
She’s right, of course. Being vulnerable isn’t something I’m terribly good at. Not like that’s exactly breaking news from someone who writes under a pseudonym. Anyhow, that’s just one more way in which this site has been stretching me. I’ll get better at it.
I really appreciate your comment, Jim. (If only Slate would find thoughts like this, eh?) And it leads quite nicely into where I’d like to go with this. I don’t know if I’m actually going to have time to continue this series until next week, but I think you’ve hit on a few key things, particularly the part where we need to learn better how to engage others who aren’t so likeminded.
While I’m still torn as to whether “community” is possible in this medium, I think that to the extent that we invest ourselves in particular conversations and in each other, then friendship certainly is. Oh, and the learning to be vulnerable part would probably help, too.
Thanks again for your comment. You’ve given me something to think about over the weekend. Have a good time in Ohio.
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