Does Facebook kill my soul?
Wolvercote Common, Oxford
The conventional wisdom — stretching back to, say, Emile Durkheim — has been that modernity/capitalism leads individuals to gradually withdraw from society, creating a loss of social cohesion. William Deresiewicz suggests that this trend (if it ever was one) is reversing with modern technology: people are more social than ever before. But he doesn’t think this is a good thing:
Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn’t say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can.
Man may be a social animal, but solitude has traditionally been a societal value. In particular, the act of being alone has been understood as an essential dimension of religious experience, albeit one restricted to a self-selected few. Through the solitude of rare spirits, the collective renews its relationship with divinity. The prophet and the hermit, the sadhu and the yogi, pursue their vision quests, invite their trances, in desert or forest or cave. For the still, small voice speaks only in silence…
The MySpace page, with its shrieking typography and clamorous imagery, has replaced the journal and the letter as a way of creating and communicating one’s sense of self…Today’s young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known to one another. They seem to lack a sense of their own depths, and of the value of keeping them hidden.
I’m sympathetic to Deresiewicz’s point: young people can be spiritually desperate, and the world would be better if people spent more time in reflection. But aren’t we just giving technology too much credit? If there is a moral panic to be had, why not focus on our school curriculum, urban poverty, and distintegrating families. Surely these are much greater determinants of the spiritual (non)health of young people than ‘technology.’
I suspect that the solution to the spiritual crisis identified by Deresiewicz may involve being more social, not less.
