Alone Again, Unnaturally

In mid-May, Kathy and I were in New York to see her daughter, Meaghan, and over 400 classmates receive masters degrees in social work from Columbia University. Those we met were bright, idealistic, and deeply committed to helping suffering and marginalized people. To pay for their studies, many took on a six-figure debt, all to prepare for a vocation that isn’t especially remunerative.

But at the graduation ceremony (at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side, graduates trod where Stones had rolled) and a party afterward, nobody was fretting about the future. Their devotion to mission, and the gracious community they’d built in their two years together, made me think of a class of seminarians. Commencement was a secular event, so no one said a public prayer. I imagine I joined thousands in the audience in quietly thanking God for the class of 2012 and the support they’d received from family members and friends.

Meg feels a calling to serve older people, which is a growth industry for social workers. We all know about the coming baby-boomer retirement bubble. By 2017, in the global population people over 65 will outnumber those under five for the first time in history.

This explosion of longevity is stalked by what some health experts call an epidemic of loneliness. Stephen Marche surveys the research in a recent Atlantic article. A 2010 AARP study found that over a third of Americans over 45 are chronically lonely, compared to a fifth of the same cohort ten years before. Another study reveals that about 60 million in the U.S. say they’re unhappy because of loneliness.

Marche’s article, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”, is one of many these days plotting the correlation between social media and social isolation. Marche doesn’t buy it, and I don’t, either. Our temperaments aren’t formed by our online interactions anymore than they are by cocktail parties and family reunions. We come fully formed to all settings of intense personal interaction, whether on-line or en masse, when we quickly display (and, if we’re lucky, learn) how we are with others – reticent or revved up, other- or self-directed, good listeners or relentless talkers.

But if Facebook isn’t making us lonely, what is? Why do naturally social organisms become unsociable? As a baby-boomer, I have a post-Vietnam, post–Watergate answer that has to do people’s skepticism about the focal points of authority that used to bind us together, especially governments, political parties, and religious organizations. Add a dose of western individualism, whose worst expression is selfishness, and you’re tending toward a society of mutually suspicious, self-sustaining loners who are (Marche also reveals) just as likely to share their troubles with a therapist – or social worker – as with a friend.

If you think my closing pitch will be that more active participation at St. John’s and in all our wonderful ministries is a sure-fire cure for loneliness, you’re only half right. Marche had a statistic for that, too: “Active believers who [see] God as abstract and helpful rather than a wrathful, immediate presence [are] less lonely.” Are we coming to church to have our worst suspicions, whether about ourselves or others, confirmed by a God of judgment? Or do we come with eyes, ears, minds, and hearts open to the unpredictable movement of the Holy Spirit, which promises to bind us closer to God and one another?

Sometimes when we log onto Facebook, we want to convince the world that our lives are in better shape that they really are. We’re also tempted to put on our game faces before we come face to face with God – which is ironic, since God “friended” us and “liked” us at the beginning of all things, has read all our data, and will never relinquish the copyright.

This post originally appeared in the St. John's Church newsletter, the Vaya Con Dios.

You Know Those E-Mails That Have Been Forwarded A Bunch Of Times, With Blue Ink And Weird Fonts?

Key source for White House speechwriters. Same thing happened at least once before.
Hat tip to Nick Thimmesch

Naw, That's Okay

Hat tip to Tom Tierney

Good News: You're Not The Only One Who Tries To Remember Something by Googling Other Things That Remind You Of It

Writing in the Washington Post, Alexandra Petri expresses alarm that, for the first time, we're spending more time on Facebook than Google:

If you're Googling, you are at least theoretically expressing the kind of curiosity that is not synonymous with stalking. You are trying to prove a point to someone. You have just whipped out your iPhone. "Hold on!" you are saying, "I'm looking it up." He is looking it up simultaneously on his Blackberry, and it is taking him much longer. You are Googling yourself. You are trying to remember what the name of that thing is by searching for other things that remind you of the thing. You are typing in a legitimate question into Google to see if it will suggest that question back to you, thereby proving that you are not the sick, lonely weirdo you are beginning to worry you might be. You suddenly wake up wanting to know something oddly specific, like what, if anything, Paul McCartney thought about Yoko Ono. You feel that you must know this, and if you go any longer without this particular piece of knowledge, your life will not be what it might have been.

123456

...and other bad passwords.

Just Take A Guess

The most expensive domain names.

She Did Buy The Shoes, BTW

This afternoon I posted on Facebook about a friend's Mustang and, not long after, noticed a Mustang ad in the right-hand column. This Wall Street Journal investigation explains how they do that. I heard the reporter, Julia Angwin, talking about it on NRP's Fresh Air not long ago.

The sites we visit most often, and advertising firms that specialize in this stuff, have ways of gathering information about the things we look at on line and generating ads that match our interests. Angwin found that the average site puts over 60 tracking devices on your computer when you visit. Often third parties are running the tracking programs without the host sites' even knowing.

Angwin said that when she checked out some shoes on line, "they kept following me around the web" as ads popped up at other places she visited. While she says that our profiles can get pretty detailed and sophisticated, our names aren't attached to them. The data is mined and traded instantaneously, since the whole idea is to get to us while we're in the market and before the data are corrupted by our fickleness, or the other people who are using our computers and start searching for guitar strings instead of pumps.

I tried to summon some outrage about an invasion of privacy inherent in this example of the market in hyperactivity, but I couldn't. This is Big Broker, not Big Brother. I only got worried when the NPR interviewer, Dave Davies, asked Angwin, "Is anyone in the government interested in this?"

More Proof Nixon Invented The Internet

Here. First announced here.

The Recession's "Web Of Fear"

Having read a perhaps apocryphal story about a fired executive begging on Madison Ave. to feed her four children, Lucy Kellaway wonders if the world wide web has ensnared us all:

The Internet has created a global psyche. The web has mentally joined us at the hip, so we can no longer put our heads in the sand. If that sounds painfully contorted, it is because it is. Just as no country can decouple itself from the ailing global economy, none of us as individuals can decouple ourselves from the ailing global psyche.

Through blogs, websites and e-mails the world’s economic ills are fed to us on a drip all day long. It is not just that we hear about bad things faster, we hear about more of them and in a more immediate way. My worries become yours, and yours become mine. On the Internet, a trouble shared online is not a trouble halved. It is a trouble needlessly multiplied all over the world.