My husband, my cousin and a professional colleague just don’t seem to get Facebook. All of them have joined this social networking phenomenon, but after mastering their username and password they seem at a complete loss. “So, Mary went to see the movie “Blind Side, what do I care?” “Joann lost her brother-in-law? I didn’t know he was ill?” Or, “I don’t plan to play with this toy very much.” But then, I notice how they sneak a peek to see what they might be missing. I am not sure what they expect, but what I suspect is that they don’t know what to say in that little “Update Status” thingy.
For example, my husband said, “what shall I say, that I shaved my face today?” “No, sweetheart, tell them that you are putting together an important report for your Council on Housing Policy Meeting tomorrow.” “Or tell them you feel that Christmas is coming too soon and you are trying to convince your wife that you already have everything you need.”
My take on this kind of behavior is that these people are not yet really connected into the cyber-hood. Everyone has experienced a “hood” of some kind. Maybe it was the Italian hood where all the kids played in the streets and nobody told on anybody. Or maybe it was the Irish hood where all the girls were beautiful and all the guys were gorgeous and they made beautiful blue-eyed, red-haired babies. Or maybe you were in an English hood where young mothers and nannies took children for walks in the parks and Mrs. Nosey One knew everything that went on in every house on the block. A place where it was safe and fun and girls giggled behind the curtains as handsome boys rode by on their bikes. Where the local pastor walked down the street greeting the moms, and the local cop stopped and chatted with all the little ones to assure them that they would be safe. Or men exchanged jokes and tools over the fence.
Today, we often don’t have that kind of land-based neighborhood. But, we do have a cyber-hood and it is called Facebook, MySpace, U-Tube, or Twitter although I find Twitter a bit restrictive. I mean, really, what woman can say anything meaningful in 140 characters? In my cyber-hood I keep in touch with a myriad of people on a day to day basis who tell me all about the straying neighbor or the kid who needed some discipline. They told me how they decorated for Christmas and where the best shopping was found. We cried together when a friend lost a dear brother-in-law, and we discussed how commercialized “Christmas” has become, and who is God.
Yes, my Facebook friends are my community, my cyber-hood, and they are the folks who touch me briefly from time to time just as I touch them with all the little things that happen in a land-based, face-to-face neighborhood. And it is good! I know my clergy friends spend a lot of time writing great sermons. I know that the lady who lives by the river has solar heating and loves it. I know the movies and the parties and the riding events that my granddaughter attends. It isn’t a perfect hood, but it is my cyber-hood and I love it. Until you engage and embrace this new kind of hood, my cyber-hood, you cannot know the joy that comes from having a group of people who know what you do on a daily (or almost daily) basis. And, the magic is that we are truly friends and neighbors – at least in our cyber-community.
Come on, join Facebook, get your feet wet and your curiosity stoked and see what this new community is all about. This hood is happy and safe if you just let it be what it is meant to be – a cyber-hood as small as a few friends, or as big as the universe!