daveingland.comCommentary and discussion on the missional church, faith, culture, media and more…

For those of you still in disbelief, I have more confirmation of my age for you. If you are connected to me on facebook, you know that I attended a high school reunion of sorts two weeks ago. It was some friends from my graduating class of 1984 (yes, 25 years ago!) getting together at a house and reconnecting. For most of us, this was the first time we had seen one another since we graduated back in 1984.

I have to admit that this reunion wasn’t all what I expected. I believe that the advent of social networking has really changed our lives forever. For those of you that weren’t even alive back in 1984, I can tell you that connecting with friends was so much different! As much as I have embraced and sometimes even overuse my social networking tools, a big part of me still lives back in 1984.

The weird thing for me was that we had a reunion, yet our small group of friends had already connected on facebook. We had already engaged in facebook comments and notes and had a familiarity with each other before showing up to the reunion gathering. So, rather than reuniting and catching up on the past 25 years, we ended up just kind of picking up on established conversation from facebook or felt so familiar with each other that we talked about current things instead of what we had done in the past 25 years or our families or careers, etc.

You see, back in 1984 we didn’t have cell phones or computers. Computers were for geeks/nerds, and as hard as it probably is for you to believe, I was not a geek in high school and I never took a computer class in college. My first computer was in 1994 and I was 28 years old at that time. Anyway, with no email or text or myspace or facebook, we had to wait to see each other in class to talk or we had to use a landline to call someone at their house. So, if we had some big news to break, we actually had to pick up the phone and make several phone calls to let our circle of friends know. Today, you can send a message to thousands of people with just the click of the send button.

Part of me misses the old, antiquated way of socializing. We didn’t have starbucks back in the 80′s and therefore we usually hung out at friend’s houses and saw what life was really like for each other. We couldn’t hide out in a coffee shop and offer the perception that everything was okay.

As much as I appreciate the connectedness that social media allows, I think it has corrupted us in some ways. Back in my high school days, for people to know me they would have had to be my personal and in-person friend or they could learn about me from gossip. Nowadays though, it is as if my reputation and online persona precede me when I meet others that I have known only through social networking beforehand. Even by people that I do not know. I remember traveling to Burbank to visit with a friend of mine that was having a church fellowship and had invited. When my friend introduced me to his brother as Dave Ingland or @daveingland from twitter, he had no clue who I was. However, after staring at my face for a minute, he exclaimed with excitement, “Oh, now I remember! You’re the guy that changes his profile picture on twitter all the time. If you’d have said that in the first place, I’d have recognized you immediately!” As you can imagine, I’d rather not be recognized as some guy that either suffers from ADHD or as some egomaniac that showcases himself through his twitter avatar. I feel as if I got some of this when I was at my class reunion gathering. Not in a demeaning way, but in a I-feel-as-if-you’ve-been-a-part-of-my-life the past 25 years and that we’re old buddies. Heck, when I walked in people were coming up to me and asking me about Star Trek because I had (as a humorous thing) superimposed my head onto the body of Sulu from Star Trek and uploaded the photo to my facebook account. I walked into a room and found every picture I had ever posted to facebook along with the pictures others had posted of themselves. It was almost as if I wasn’t a former classmate from high school when I walked through the door, but that I was perceived as everyone’s facebook buddy.

For my classmates that were at the gathering and may be reading this, I am not complaining about anything. I had an absolute blast seeing everyone and love and appreciate each of you! However, I’m not much for being superficial with my friends and since I consider you my friends, I want to get to know you and learn of what you have done since we graduated. I want more than a facebook friends gathering. So, I have invited each of you to my house for a BBQ later this month and I look forward to catching up a bit with each of you at that time.

Social networking is a wonderful thing. I’m even going to be speaking at the Cool Twitter Conference in San Francisco because of my belief that some great things can happen to help us better-use social networking tools as a community of faith. However, I still find a distinction between my close, personal friends and my online friends. I connect often with my online friends, but when I desire more I pick up the phone and call or setup a video conference. I also do what I can to physically see my friends in-person and build upon our relationships.

Facebook and twitter have helped me stay better-connected with friends more than before we all started using these tools. My seminary friends and I are always communicating via facebook and/or twitter and that is a nice thing. However, I’ve committed to still see my seminary friends face-to-face when I can afford to do so. It’s important to me. It’s probably my experiences from connecting and bonding with people in a world that precluded social networks. However, I think it goes much deeper than that. I just feel like there are limitations to relationships online and as I’ve found out recently, it’s too easy to have things misunderstood when facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice can’t be comprehended through a facebook comment or a 140 character tweet. It’s caused some tension in some of my communication that *definitely* would not have arisen had we been conducting a face-to-face communication.

To my close, personal friends I truly hope that we’ll never, ever give in to the convenience and the fact that social media is free to cause us to stop desiring to stay see each other in person and share more of our lives with each other. To my facebook and twitter friends that I have yet to meet, may there be a way made to see you in-person and share some time getting to know each other away from the computer. It’s who I am and no amount of technology will ever change that. social networking has changed the way we live, but it won’t ever take the place of sharing real space together with my friends.