"You, me, and everybody else"

Some thoughts about social networks, friendship, and community from a student in my "Catholic Social Thought and the Law" class:

You, Me, and Everyone We Know

 It is worth noting that Facebook disclosed yesterday (May 3) an IPO target price that pegs the company’s worth at $96B.  If the numbers hold, this would make Facebook the most valuable company at the time of its IPO in U.S. history, eclipsing the former record holder (UPS in 1996) by some $36B.   According to a CIO Journal article, this figure suggests that every user is worth about $81 to Facebook.  Every friendship is worth $0.62.  And the average profile page may be worth up to $1800.  The story is well-known.  Roughly eight years ago, a jilted lover started a website, and Tuesday’s target valuation makes the erstwhile Romeo, Mr. Zuckerberg, worth more than the entire annual economic output of a host of countries.

 I am 28 years old, but decades older—if my old man* counts as a relevant measure—when it comes to being a buzzkill about online social networks (but I love blogs).  Full disclosure, I have certainly been known throughout my law school career to fill my computer screen with GCHATS rather than Securities Regulation notes, but that—I think most will agree—is nothing more than a classic case of opting for a lesser evil. 

By now it’s a familiar refrain about technology, but I like the real thing better.  Friendship, I mean.  Of course, I understand the value of photo-sharing and keeping in touch with those far distant, and all the other rationalizations made in favor of spending a couple of brainless hours every day tending to one’s online image.  But give me a garden rather than Farmville, a bottle of wine and a few good friends rather than a photo captioned “Wish you were here,” or when necessary, just a quiet night free from the intrusive and distracting technologies that can imperil true leisure.   I wish I could say that it was discipline and self-restraint that counseled my own departure from Facebook, but in fact it was kind of the opposite.  A nasty break-up, and I found I couldn’t handle the online fallout, the access, the tempting, open window on a life of which I was no longer a meaningful part.  So, I quit.  And I liked it.  But that’s just the thing: the self-restraint and discipline I lacked—extraordinary and rare traits in my experience—may be necessary to dilute the corrosive effects to community posed by these nascent, virtual replications. It would be a joke worthy of Orwell (who, by the way, didn’t tell a lot of jokes) if the blokes who set out to create an online community ended up ruining the genuine thing and got paid a packet to do it.

So, okay, maybe it’s not quite as bad as all that.  But the big numbers, when you think about what it is exactly that is being valued, should at least give us pause and the opportunity to consider possible ramifications for the Catholic idea of community, for the families that form the vital cells of those communities, and for the body of Christ.