“Are your wonders known in the darkness, or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? (Psalm 88:12)

Annoying, but...

A couple years ago a fellow journalist suggested I join the social networking site Facebook. By using the site to post links to articles I write, she said, my writing would have greater visibility.

My friend was right. Since being on Facebook the amount of people who read my articles has doubled. Moreover, I have found it to be an invaluable tool for networking with other intellectuals, many of whom have contributed valuable insights to my own projects.

At the same time, however, Facebook is not without its drawbacks. In particular, the more I use the service, the more I have become aware of certain worldview assumptions implicit in the project.

This was impressed upon me last month when Facebook supposedly “improved” its layout. The normal news feeds are now duplicated with a “ticker” on the right hand side that offers a constantly changing stream of details about what my friends are doing in real time. For example, right now my ticker is showing me that one of my friends just finished listening to Schumann’s “Carnaval”, that another friend is telling his wife how much he loves her, and that another friend just managed to get her children to school on time.

Almost nobody is happy with the changes which allow you to “Facebook while you Facebook.” And although they keep saying it’s possible for individual users to revert back to the old style, I haven’t yet figured out how to do that.

OK, so it’s annoying, but is there anything deeper going on?

What’s now is what’s important

It has been observed by numerous thinkers (Lewis Mumford, Neil Postman and, more recently Nicholas Carr, to name just a few) that our technologies orient towards certain understandings of the world. Inventions from the map to the clock to the book to the television all implicate tacit understandings of time, space, and human relationships.

Facebook is no exception. The tacit understanding of the world brought to us by Facebook and underscored by its recent changes seems to be this: what is recent with what is most important; what is happening right now is the most worthy of my attention.

The news vs. the olds

Facebook can be seen as the final culmination of a long stream of technologies - from the newspaper to the telegraph to the television to the internet - which pander to the human bias for newness. This bias has always been part of the human species, since a key element to our survival has been our brains’ instinctive gravitation to the most recent changes in our environment. But while this can be useful in helping us to detect the slight movement of a leopard in the tree above us, or the movement of a snake in the corner of our tent, the Internet has pandered to the brains’ tendency to focus on what is recent at the expense of what is enduring.

In his book Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal, T. David Gordon suggests that the modern obsession with newness (what he calls contemporaneity) may not be entirely a good thing. Gordon perceptively notes that

“…in giving so much attention to what is recent…we become contemporaneists, people who intuitively believe that giving attention to what is recent is more important than giving attention to what is not recent. Otherwise, why would I care to read a newspaper account of someone robbing a convenience store yesterday rather than read an account of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency?... Notice that our vocabulary contains the expression ‘the news’ and not the expression ‘the olds,’ though both concepts exist. Some events are recent; some events are not – but we have an expression for only the one, because only the one can be mass-produced and mass-marketed in a commercially viable way. But one cannot sell ‘the news’ until one first sells the idea that ‘the new’ is more important than ‘the old.’ Many events hold our attention merely because they are recent, proved by the fact that we almost never read a newspaper that is a week old. If a historian wrote a book about the mundane realities that appear in the newspaper (or on the televised news), no one would read the book. We expect historians to exercise good judgment about which events are worthy of our attention – an expectation with which we do not encumber ‘the news.’ …is something worthy of my (limited) attention merely because it occurred recently?”

Facebook has long been committed to the ethic of contemporaneity. Significantly, in an ABC news report on Facebook’s recent changes, Sandra Ecklund wrote that “Instead of the chronological newsfeed of constant updates from your friends, you’ll see what Facebook thinks is important.” That’s the rub: what Facebook thinks is important? What Facebook thinks is important is what is current, fresh, up-to-date, and happening this very second. The Good Life is Now.

Facebook has long been committed to the values of contemporaneity. In his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr commented that

“When, in early 2009, Facebook responded to Twitter’s rapid growth by announcing that it was revamping its site to, as it put it, ‘increase the pace of the stream,’ its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, assured its quarter of a billion members that the company would ‘continue making the flow of information even faster.’ Unlike early book printers, who had strong economic incentives to promote the reading of older works as well as recent ones, online publishers battle to distribute the newest of the new.”

Carr is concerned that this obsession with newness may be diminishing an important aspect of human thought.  “It was once understood” he writes, “that the most effective filter of human thought is time.” By contrast, now “we no longer have the patience to await time’s slow and scrupulous winnowing.”

The changes introduced by Facebook should come as no surprise since the entire Internet is geared towards the ethic of contemporaneity. In May 2009 Google adjusted its algorithms for assessing a website’s importance (and therefore its ranking in the catalogue of search results) to include the criteria of “freshness.” This means that searches are geared towards prioritizing newer pages over older ones.

The trade-off

Don’t get me wrong. Facebook, like all technologies, is simply a tool. Moreover, it is a tool that has been enormously beneficial to the Church. It allows God’s people to keep in touch with each other, to exchange prayer requests, to debate issues of theological import, and to maintain relationships that might otherwise go extinct. But like all tools, it comes with a trade-off.

The trade-off is that we become unconsciously trained to think that what is latest is best, or at least the most worthy of our attention. This was a tendency that C.S. Lewis drew attention to in his inaugural lecture in 1954 after assuming the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. In the lecture Lewis criticized the advertising industry for assigning superior valuation to what is latest:

“How has it come about that we use the highly emotive word ‘stagnation,’ with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called ‘permanence’?...Why does ‘latest’ in advertisements mean ‘best?’”

Facebook does not explicitly tell us that what is latest is best, but it does strongly imply that in the way it organizes data, not least in its most recent set of changes.

Next steps: Start a Facebook Revolution! Use your Facebook account to share with friends some of “the olds” which have been especially meaningful to you: something from the Old Testament; and old Christian writer whose work has blessed you; an older Christian leader whose views are worth reading. Let’s make “the olds” a more prominent part of “the news.”