One sure-fire method of bonding with a fellow Christian who lies anywhere along the theological spectrum is to lament the loss of community. Everyone agrees that community is a good thing. Everyone agrees that it is gone. And everyone agrees that it would be a good thing to have back again.
Given those truths, how cautious must we be about proposed technologies for reclaiming community? Very much so. The small group movement was championed as one such technology. But according to Robert Wuthnow’s book Sharing the Journey, a detailed study of both religious and secular small groups, these groups have had exactly the opposite effect; rather than rebuilding community, they have abetted its disintegration by lessening the pain that results from rootlessness and isolation, making it easier for people to abandon community life.
The latest candidate technology for building community is the internet. Some have suggested that since the internet is not bound by physical geography, it becomes possible for geographically scattered individuals of like mind to gather together as Netizens, settlers in cyberspace—and where like-minded people gather, community will arise. No doubt this is true for some definition of the word “community.” But not all community qualifies as biblical community, and so we must approach this technology as cautiously as the rest.
The most obvious distinctive of life in cyberspace is an ominous one: communication is generally restricted to the written word. This skews interpersonal relationships among the Netizens in disturbing ways. Since you only exist in cyberspace by virtue of your words, it is necessary to keep those words flowing. Glibness is substantial, while conciseness is ephemeral. Writing thoughtfully works against you, since it tends to slow down both writer and reader. Self-centered bombast can establish you as a Net personality—caricature, really—while considerate and irenic writing tends to blur your image because it makes you difficult to categorize.
It is indeed a miracle that non-technical people can communicate through the internet, a miracle made possible through God’s gift of the written word. The gift is powerful, but the gift is also limited, meant to exist as one part of a rich and varied context of communication. To use this gift alone as the building block of a community is to skew the nature of that community, to restrict it to interaction at a purely intellectual level, to forego elements such as gesture, tone of voice, laughter, facial expressions, unknowingly observed behavior—anything that requires physical presence.
These aren’t novel observations. But the common response to them is to assume that such a community could still be a Good Thing, and then to tackle its limitations through the application of Yankee ingenuity, to start thinking up ways to compensate for the lack of physical presence—video cameras, microphones, perhaps Smell-o-vision. Let’s instead take a moment to reflect on the deeper implications of a community which by nature must exclude physical presence. We’ll find a worthwhile guide for those reflections in a long-standing philosophy whose highest goal is the elimination of physical presence—gnosticism.
Gnostics yearn for an immaterial state, not simply because of their distaste for matter, but because they imagine another, better existence than this one. Gnosticism is at its heart an attempt to escape the circumstances into which God has placed us, and as such it is a denial of both the goodness of God and the goodness of His creation. So we must consider whether life as a Netizen simply adds another, desirable dimension to our physical life, or if such an existence necessarily constitutes an attempt to escape from this physical life into a superior one.
Cyberspace can be attractive not only for what you’ll find there, but also for what you’ll leave behind. Perhaps we are attracted by the low cost of entry, the ease of finding like-minded people, the high value placed on spirited intellectual discussion, the vast smorgasbord of topics to sample, the opportunity to establish and shape an online personality unencumbered by past history. We find our existence validated in ways denied to us in the physical world; other Netizens acknowledge our presence, hear us, even admire us—and all they ask of us is that we acknowledge, hear, and admire them back. And if circumstances ever become unpleasant, well, we can instantly transport our immaterial selves to another part of cyberspace where we have no history—and no antagonists.
But consider that each one of those attractions is in essence the lowering of a physical barrier that was originally put in place by God for His own purposes. He is the one who scatters the like-minded geographically, who throws together people of widely varying interests and intellectual capabilities, who gives them real-life responsibilities that cut into their gabfest time, who gives them histories and behaviors that can make relationships between them challenging. He is the one who gives us difficult bosses, difficult spouses, difficult children, difficult relatives, difficult friends.
We prefer cyberspace to our physical community not because it is superior, but because we find the wrong things attractive. Where we should view our physical burdens as avenues to further sanctification, as opportunities to be rejoiced over (James 1:2-4), we instead dismiss them as difficulties best avoided. A proper appreciation of the burdens that God bestows upon us and our brethren cannot be cultivated as we yearn to escape from them. What we are in fact yearning to escape are the good works that God prepared beforehand that we might walk in them (Ephesians 2:10), those works without which our faith is dead (James 2:17).
There is nothing to do in cyberspace but talk and listen. When we encounter a brother in need, it profits him nothing for us to express our sympathy (James 2:15-17). But when the only tools available to us are words, we can respond to his need with little more than an anemic “I’ll pray for you”, leaving us unable—conveniently so—to fulfill the law of Christ by bearing his burden (Galatians 6:2).
Resist the urge to view cyberspace as a better place, as a place where you can at least temporarily escape the difficulties of incarnate community, a place in which you can always expect a sympathetic “there, there” as you moan about your physical burdens. Strive for a simple, unified life, one where contentment is found among real people rather than their electronic avatars, one where joy is sought in the very trials of everyday life.