The death of conversation?

In the last four days I’ve spent quite a lot of time writing a couple of blog posts on topics that I thought were important, here and here.

As I usually do, I announced them on Twitter and Facebook.

Nobody bothered to retweet them, nobody on Facebook bothered to even “like” them, much less click on the link and read them.In fact I doubt if Facebook even bothered to show them to my friends. Facebook, after all, is concerned to show us only the really important stuff, like “X sent you are request in Hidden Chronicles” and “Y sent you a request in Slotomania”.

Paper.li, which collects and organises Twitter tweets with links and shows them in a readable form, didn’t show the first one of them either (I’m going to retweet it every day until it does).

So when I saw this link, shown in Paper.li and Twitter, I retweeted it. Now everyone is connected, is this the death of conversation? | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian:

As our meeting places fall silent, save for tapping on screens, it seems we have mistaken ubiquitous connection for the real thing.

And I think it’s worse than that. Simon Jenkins is talking about viva voce conversations, actual face-to-face, voice to ear ones.But it’s reached the online conversations as well.

Twenty years ago we used BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems). They used amateur networks run by volunteers, computers with monochrome screens and no graphics, dial-up lines where 1200 bits per second was considered normal, 2400 fast, 9600 leading edge and 14400 out of this world. But we had real conversations, and talked about real things. And we managed to talk to people on the other side of the world, whom we could never hope to meet face-to-face, (though we did sometimes contrive to meet some of them — I had lunch with three online friends in a Chinese restaurant somewhere in New Jersey in 1995, and met a couple of others in Moscow a week earlier. I still see them on Facebook, but we have much less to say for each other, because Facebook doesn’t encourage real conversations like the BBS networks used to.

The BBS software, again, mostly written by amateurs, got the transmission of real conversations down to a fine art, and was way better for the purpose than anything you see on the Internet. It was “obsoleted” by Windows 95, which made it more difficult to connect to a modem by hiding its communication program several layers deep, and not installing it as a default. But it was not really obsolete, it was just far in advance of anything you see today, and sidelined because it was run for pleasure and not for profit.

And the point of this rant is, that as someone once said, we live in a world of communication without community. Well, he said it about 20 years ago, and now it is worse, because we live in a world of connectivity without communication. We have all these marvellous tools for communication, and we no longer have anything to say to each other.

I sometimes look at my blog stats to see what brings people to look at my blogs, and there is a clear pattern, trivial nonsense is much more attractive and popular than anything that tries to say anything. I once had a firewall called ZoneAlarm, and it kept telling me that “Google Installer is trying to access the Internet” I had no idea what Google installer was, or why it was trying to access the Internet, but I felt that if it was trying to access the Internet from my computer it should at least have the courtesy to tell me that it was doing so, and tell me why. So I wrote a blog post about this, asking if anyone knew (nobody did). Now everyone wants to read that post, which I wrote in a couple of minutes, but nobody wants to read anything I took real trouble over. .

I read a Tweet from a friend that says, “

Loading Tweets seems to be taking a while.

Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup.”

Oh well, if Twitter gets over its hiccups before I finish writing this post, then I’ll tell you what he said. But my reply was ‘What the heck are “community stations” and “independent ports”? Is MetroRail going #socialist at last?’

His Tweet mentioned “community stations” and “independent ports” but I didn’t have a clue what they were. We used to have the SAR&H (South African Railways and Harbours) about 25 years ago, but it was privatised, and  split up into Transnet, with subsidiaries Spoornet and MetroRail and PortNet and a few others..

MetroRail was the suburban train services, so “community stations” sounded as though they were turning all the stations into independent stations run by the local community — a nice socialist idea. And “independent ports” sounded like they were dropping the “net” from PortNet, and making each port independent. But in a tweet without a link, it really isn’t possible to tell. (In joke: at about the time this privatisation was happening someone suggested that they were going to privatise the Dutch Reformed Church and call it GloNet — which is Afrikaans for “only believe”).

So tweet something trivial, and everyone will retweet it. Post a link to something important, and no one will. Post a platitude on Facebook and everyone will “like” and “share” it. Post something that is important to you, and no one will, because Facebook won’t even show it to them.

And no, my only request in Slotmania and Hidden Chronicles as that people please stop sending me requests. 

Communication without community

In a recent post Bishop Alan’s Blog: Why ordination? Why today? Bishop Alan quotes an author, Eugene H. Peterson as saying:

The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shop-keepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shop-keepers’ concerns — how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.

Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shop-keeping; religious shop-keeping, to be sure, but shop-keeping all the same… “A walloping great congregation is fine, and fun,” says Martin Thornton, “but what most communities really need is a couple of saints. The tragedy is that they may well be there in embryo, waiting to be discovered, waiting for sound training, waiting to be emancipated from the cult of the mediocre.”

The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them.

And one of Bishop Alan’s blogging friends, Simple Massing Priest, responded to this thus:

I’ve said before that statistics only tell you what they tell you and that’s all they tell you. Thus statistics about average Sunday attendance or giving by members do tell you something about the vitality of a congregation. But what they’re telling isn’t always clear. And even when it’s clear, it may not be important.

If only we could find some discrete statistical way to quantify the transforming work of the Holy Spirit in the life of a community and in the lives of individuals.

He goes on, however, in another post Simple Massing Priest: The Great Heresy(ies) to say:

Historically, Catholic Christianity has always seen the collective expression of the Body of Christ – that is to say the Church – as important. While never denying the importance of individual faith, individual devotion and individual piety, a Christian is properly a Christian because they are part of Christ’s Body, the Church. To treat Christian faith as being an entirely individual undertaking – as seems altogether too common in some circles – is manifestly heretical. The Ethiopian eunuch came to believe as an individual, but it was baptism by Philip which grafted him into the Church. The lot fell on Matthias as an individual, but his Apostolic authority came from being ‘added to the eleven Apostles.’

Now, I agree that there is, as always, a polar opposite heresy – the heresy that would emphasize the collective to the exclusion, diminution and discarding of the individual. That heresy might take many forms, but it would certainly be a heresy.

Individualism and collectivism are both Western heresies, or perhaps I should say heresies of Western modernity. And they are both related to (and are perhaps the root of) the obsession with counting, and the idea that if things are not numerically quantifiable, they aren’t worth bothering with. Things must be “measurable”, and this is often used as a kind of label of approval. “Measurable” is an epithet tagged on to things to make us think that they must be good.

The Orthodox theologian Christos Yannaras has a different take on it

In everyday speech we tend to distort the meaning of the word ‘person’. What we call ‘person’ or ‘personal’ designates rather more the individual. We have grown accustomed to regarding the terms ‘person’ and ‘individual’ as virtually synonymous, and we use the two indifferently to express the same thing. From one point of view, however, ‘person’ and ‘individual’ are opposite in meaning. The individual is the
denial or neglect of the distinctiveness of the person, the attempt to define human existence using the objective properties of man’s common nature, and quantitative
comparisons and analogies. Chiefly in the field of sociology and politics the human being is frequently identified with the idea of numerical individuality. Sometimes this rationalistic process of leveling out is considered progress, since it helps
to make the organization of society more efficient.

One manifestation of this, especially in America, is the failure to understand objections to attempts to expunge the inclusive use of the word “man” from our vocabulary. Some people insist that “man” must refer exclusively to males, and ought not, indeed cannot, include females.

They would demand that the word “man” be removed from a phrase like “reconciliation between God and man, and man and man” and replaced with some impersonal abstract collective term like “humanity”, and fail to see that this changes the meaning, and the reason they fail to see this is because they cannot see the distinction between individuals and persons.

In part this is because a a deficiency in the English language. Other languages have different terms for a person of either sex and a male person. Greek has anthropos and aner, Latin has homo and vir, Zulu has umuntu and indoda, but English has to make do with “man” and “man”. Zulu even has a saying umuntu ungumuntu ngabantu — “a person is a person because of people”. But because Western modernity prefers to see things that are quantifiable and countable, the idea that persons need communities in order to be persons at all seems quite alien. The Orthodox anthropology that Yannaras describes is communitarian rather than aligned with Western individualism or collectivism — and I’ve discussed the economic ramifications of that in another post.

However, another blogging friend, Dion’s random ramblings, writes about using social media:

Build a wide range of relationships. This is where twitter and facebook come in. The intention of these relationships is the create opportunities to interact around common interests and concerns, and particularly to drive traffic to my content! I cannot emphasize this last point strongly enough!

As should be apparent from my previous post, I have grave reservations about simply “driving traffic” without being concerned with the quality of the traffic. For example, on Blog Catalog I have 8 friends. They are people I have interacted with, either face-to-face or online. There are many more who have said that they want to be my “friend”, but they haven’t bothered to read any of my blogs. What kind of idea of friendship is this?

As one writer put it, we live in an age of communication without community. People say that they want to be our “friends”, but they don’t want to talk to us, or exchange ideas. A person is a person because of people, but in individual is an individual in isolation from other people. Occasionally feral children have been found, children that were lost and brought up by animals, and they find it very difficult to interact with other people. They may be individuals, but they find it very difficult to become persons till they have faces, and some people don’t seem to want to have faces. Faces have been replaced by “avatars” and “personas”.

Who is Raymond A. Foss?

Who is Raymond A. Foss — or, What is “community”?

Whenever I look at the social blogrolling site MyBlogLog, I see the footprint of Raymond A. Foss, who seems to be a member of the “community” of every single Christian blog registered with MyBlogLog.

If you look at his profile page you can see that he is in fact a member of 2487 “communities” on MyBlogLog, and that he has 5629 family, friends and contacts.

But when I visit the blogs whose “communities” I am a member of, I hardly ever see Raymond A. Foss among the “Recent Visitors” to those blogs.

A few months ago my wife was watching a TV programme, I think on the BBC, called The human footprint, which was about the effect that the average human being has on their environment over their lifetime, and one of the things they noted was that the average inhabitant of the British Isles knew about 1750 people in the course of their life.

I decided to try to make a list of all the people I’ve known — family, friends, colleagues at work, casual acquaintances. I include people I’ve met and that I remember having had conversations with, even if I’ve only met them once or twice. I’ve got nearly 700 listed for far. I don’t do this all the time, just in odd moments while waiting the kettle to boil for coffee and times like that.

The idea of someone having 5269 friends and contacts just boggles the mind. And especially since Ramond A. Foss never seems to interact most of the people that he has listed in this way, or with the blog “communities” he has joined.

Raymond A. Foss is not the only one, however.

Another one who joined a lot of Christian blog communities and then rarely or never visited them is Called2Bless.

I mention these two because I keep seeing their pictures (avatars) every day, in the “communities” they have joined, but rarely if ever interact with.

And things like this make me wonder what is community, and what do people think it means?

It’s not confined to MyBlogLog, but can be found on every social networking site. Several times a week I get e-mails from people who claim to have seen my profile, and say that they want to be my friend, and ask me to send a photo. I usually just delete them unread. If they really wanted to be my friend, they would read my blogs, and write intelligent comments on some of the articles, and it would become clear that we have at least some common interests, something to talk about.

Over the last 20 years I have had several “friends” I have made through electronic networking, through BBSs, and later Usenet and the Internet. Some of them I have never met in the flesh, but have kept in touch with them for 10, 15 or 20 years. In some cases I have met them, and we’ve continued our electronic conversations face to face. In that way there is a community, a network of friends and relationships, because there is interaction between people. And its those kinds of relationships that social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are designed to foster and facilitate. But some people seem to want to call “friends” people they have never met and show no desire to communicate with.

Another example of this false “community” and false “friendship”, where people claim friendship with not communication or interaction comes from another social blogrolling site, BlogCatalog.

BlogCatalog has an equivalent of MyBlogLog’s “communities”, which it calls “favorites” (and used to call “neighbourhoods”). These are blogs that you want to mark for return visits.

But it also has “groups”, for people who share common interests.

I recently started a group there for Orthodox Christian bloggers, because I looked for such a group and didn’t find one, and thought it might make it easier to maintain contact with people who share a common interest. Soon after it started shamirdevnath joined. Shamir Devnath does not appear to be an Orthodox Christian, and his blog did not appear to have any recent posts on Orthodox Christianity, so I rejected his membership. Three days later he joined again, so I banned him. Shamir Devnath belongs to 1217 groups on BlogCatalog. I’ve no idea what the average size of a group on BlogCatalog is, but the Orthodox Christian bloggers group has 10 members so far, though it is fairly new, so more may join. But if all those 1217 groups had an average of 10 people, that’s 12170 people. How can someone like Shamirdevnath relate to so many people? As far as I can see, it’s impossible. So why is he (and again, there are many others like him) so keen to join groups in which he clearly has no interest, and has no desire to interact with?

Also on BlogCatalog I get e-mails several times a week telling me that so-and-so has added me as their friend. Half of them are people I have never heard of, never interacted with. According to the BlogCatalog widget, they’ve never even looked at any of my blogs, much less commented on the posts. Why on earth do they want to add me as their “friend”, when I don’t know them, and they don’t know me, and apparently don’t even want to know me. If they wanted to know me, at least they could read my blog.

Back to MyBlogLog: soon after I joined, they introduced a new feature — that members could send a message to all the members of the community of their blog.

There was an outcry from some people, who complained that they would be inundated by “spam”. The loudest squeals came from someone who had joined over 9000 “communities”, but if they didn’t want communication from them, why did they join them in the first place?

Don’t get me wrong — I like social blogrolling sites like BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog. I wish all the blogs I am interested in would join them, because it would make it easier to keep track of ones that deal with topics I am interested in. But when people join communities they have no interest in, it dilutes the usefulness. If everyone joins everything, there is no point in anyone joining anything.

What kind of world do we live in, where people want to join groups that they have no interest in, where they want to call people their “friends”, but have no communication with them?

The kinds of things I have mentioned above indicate to me that we live in a seriously dysfunctional society, and this dysfuction is not confined to one country or one group of countries, or one culture, but seems spread throughout the world.

Nearly twenty years ago someone wrote “The Rushdie affair showed how dangerous is the present stage of global development – a stage of communication without community” (Anderson, Walter Truett. 1990. Reality isn’t what it used to be. San Francisco: Harper. p. 241).

That was a book about postmodernity.

But now we seem to have reached post-postmodernity, where we have reached an even more dangerous stage — a stage of community without communication.

What a friend we have in Whatsisname

In the last two days I have been informed by BlogCatalog that four people have listed me as their “friend”. I don’t actually know any of them, and as far as I can tell (and Blog Catalog is supposed to tell you these things) not one of them has actually visited any of my blogs.

On BlogCatalog I am told I am a friend of 30 people, and probably about 20 of them I don’t know at all, and they have never visited any of my blogs. By contrast, I have three people listed as my friends. Two of them I have met in the flesh, and the third, whom I haven’t actually met, I have been communicating with on line for nearly 20 years.

BlogCatalog is a social blogrolling site; it is primarily a way of seeing who has visited your blog recently, and keeping track of the blogs of people you know. In that, it performs a useful function, but it gets a bit counterproductive when people add as “friends” people they don’t know and who don’t know them, and in whom they have no interest and with whom they have no desire to communicate.

Another similar social blogrolling site is MyBlogLog. Instead of “friends”, they have “contacts”, but the principle is the same, and so is the abuse. MyBlogLog allows you to categorise contancts into “Family”, “Friends” and just “Contacts”, but again, it really makes little sense to list as contacts people with whom you have no contact, and no desire to be in contact.

I list as “contacts” or “friends” only people I actually communicate with. At a minimum, I would say that they should have left at least three comments on my blog, and I should have left at least three comments on theirs. But preferably they should also be people I communicate with outside the blogosphere, either by e-mail or face to face.

Much the same sort of thing can be said of Twitter, where I am sometimes informed that someone new is “following” me, and when I have a look, I discover that that person is “following” (seems more like “stalking” to me) several thousand other people. Twitter isn’t even a social blogrolling thing. It’s where I let my wife know that I have or haven’t bought black plastic rubbish bags at the supermarket so that she can know whether she does or doesn’t need to get some on her way home from work. Actually, I have great difficulty in getting my wife or other members of my close family to read Twitter, so it seems that there isn’t much point in it, and the only people reading it are people on the other side of the world whom I’ve never met, and am never likely to.

And to such people I would say, don’t follow me on Twitter — read my blog(s), and comment on them, then at least we’ll be communicating. If you don’t want to read my blogs, if you find them boring, or irrelevant to your interests, then there is no conceivable reason why you would want me as a friend or a contact.

My wife watched a TV programme a few months ago that mentioned that the average person knows about 1750 people in their life time. Out of curiosity I’ve tried to list all the people I’ve known to see if I can reach 1750. I’ve almost reached 500. It boggles the mind when people are apparently “following” over 8000 people on Twitter, or list over 8000 “contacts” or “friends” on social blogtolling sites.

One social commentator remarked that ” The Rushdie affair showed how dangerous is the present stage of global development – a stage of communication without community”. [1] But I think Anderson underestimated it. It certainly isn’t community, and there doesn’t seem to be much communication either. It seems that the more tools we have to communicate, the less communication actually takes place.

I’ve ranted about this before, so perhaps some people are finding it boring (another reason why you don’t want me as your friend). So perhaps I should end this rant with something positive, some hints on how to get the best out of social blogrolling sites like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog:

• Log in to social blogrolling sites you belong to, and don’t log out. If you are logged out you won’t show up on the widget on other people’s blogs, so they won’t know if you’ve visited and so are less likely to pay your blog a return visit.
• Put the “Recent visitors” widget somewhere on your blog. Visitors can then find other blogs that they might find interesting, since if they are interested in your blog they will probably find the blogs of frequent visitors to your blog interesting as well.
• List your interests (“tags” in MyBlogLog) so that others can find your blog more easily.
• Don’t list people as “friends” or “contacts” unless you actually know them and want to communicate with them. And above all don’t list anyone as a friend if you haven’t read their blog.

___

References

[1] Anderson, Walter Truett. 1990. Reality isn’t what it used to be. San Francisco: Harper. Dewey: 909.82. Page 241.

What a friend we have in Whatsisname

In the last two days I have been informed by BlogCatalog that four people have listed me as their “friend”. I don’t actually know any of them, and as far as I can tell (and Blog Catalog is supposed to tell you these things) not one of them has actually visited any of my blogs.

On BlogCatalog I am told I am a friend of 30 people, and probably about 20 of them I don’t know at all, and they have never visited any of my blogs. By contrast, I have three people listed as my friends. Two of them I have met in the flesh, and the third, whom I haven’t actually met, I have been communicating with on line for nearly 20 years.

BlogCatalog is a social blogrolling site; it is primarily a way of seeing who has visited your blog recently, and keeping track of the blogs of people you know. In that, it performs a useful function, but it gets a bit counterproductive when people add as “friends” people they don’t know and who don’t know them, and in whom they have no interest and with whom they have no desire to communicate.

Another similar social blogrolling site is MyBlogLog. Instead of “friends”, they have “contacts”, but the principle is the same, and so is the abuse. MyBlogLog allows you to categorise contancts into “Family”, “Friends” and just “Contacts”, but again, it really makes little sense to list as contacts people with whom you have no contact, and no desire to be in contact.

I list as “contacts” or “friends” only people I actually communicate with. At a minimum, I would say that they should have left at least three comments on my blog, and I should have left at least three comments on theirs. But preferably they should also be people I communicate with outside the blogosphere, either by e-mail or face to face.

Much the same sort of thing can be said of Twitter, where I am sometimes informed that someone new is “following” me, and when I have a look, I discover that that person is “following” (seems more like “stalking” to me) several thousand other people. Twitter isn’t even a social blogrolling thing. It’s where I let my wife know that I have or haven’t bought black plastic rubbish bags at the supermarket so that she can know whether she does or doesn’t need to get some on her way home from work. Actually, I have great difficulty in getting my wife or other members of my close family to read Twitter, so it seems that there isn’t much point in it, and the only people reading it are people on the other side of the world whom I’ve never met, and am never likely to.

And to such people I would say, don’t follow me on Twitter — read my blog(s), and comment on them, then at least we’ll be communicating. If you don’t want to read my blogs, if you find them boring, or irrelevant to your interests, then there is no conceivable reason why you would want me as a friend or a contact.

My wife watched a TV programme a few months ago that mentioned that the average person knows about 1750 people in their life time. Out of curiosity I’ve tried to list all the people I’ve known to see if I can reach 1750. I’ve almost reached 500. It boggles the mind when people are apparently “following” over 8000 people on Twitter, or list over 8000 “contacts” or “friends” on social blogtolling sites.

One social commentator remarked that ” The Rushdie affair showed how dangerous is the present stage of global development – a stage of communication without community”. [1] But I think Anderson underestimated it. It certainly isn’t community, and there doesn’t seem to be much communication either. It seems that the more tools we have to communicate, the less communication actually takes place.

I’ve ranted about this before, so perhaps some people are finding it boring (another reason why you don’t want me as your friend). So perhaps I should end this rant with something positive, some hints on how to get the best out of social blogrolling sites like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog:

• Log in to social blogrolling sites you belong to, and don’t log out. If you are logged out you won’t show up on the widget on other people’s blogs, so they won’t know if you’ve visited and so are less likely to pay your blog a return visit.
• Put the “Recent visitors” widget somewhere on your blog. Visitors can then find other blogs that they might find interesting, since if they are interested in your blog they will probably find the blogs of frequent visitors to your blog interesting as well.
• List your interests (“tags” in MyBlogLog) so that others can find your blog more easily.
• Don’t list people as “friends” or “contacts” unless you actually know them and want to communicate with them. And above all don’t list anyone as a friend if you haven’t read their blog.

___

References

[1] Anderson, Walter Truett. 1990. Reality isn’t what it used to be. San Francisco: Harper. Dewey: 909.82. Page 241.

Utopian communities – synchroblog

Utopia has been a recurring theme in literature since Thomas More, an English lawyer and statesman, wrote his book with that title in the early 16th century. He described an island with an almost perfect society of peace, justice and freedom.

Many have had such a vision of a perfect society, but acknowledge that no actual examples can be found in the everyday world. Utopian literature was revived in the 19th century, with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, a satire on nineteenth-century Britain, and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Utopia Limited, in which the inhabitants of a remote island believe that the best way to achieve perfection is to turn their country into a joint stock company on the British model. I don’t think it has been performed much since Margaret Thatcher came to power.

In the nineteenth century there were also a number of “utopian communities” — groups of people who, while recognising that a perfect society could be found nowhere on earth, nevertheless tried to criate a microcosm that would reflect this vision.

In this sense, the Christian Church has always been utopian.

In the Christian vision, the perfect society is the Kingdom of God, a kingdom that is “not of this world” in the sense that there are no borders, nowhere you can show your passport to get in. But the Church itself is to be an ikon, an image of the Kingdom.

This applies even to the Christian family, as Father Alexander Schmemann points out in his book For the life of the world. The crowns in the Orthodox marriage service are symbols that the husband and wife are to be king and queen to each other in a little kingdom that reflects the heavenly kingdom. The vision may be lost, perhaps even in a single night. But the fact remains that every Christian family is a utopian community, trying to reflect in this world something that is not of this world.

Immigrants to new countries often gather for celebrations to remember their distant homeland. In many parts of the world one finds Caledonian Societies to gather emigrant Scots, Hellenic Communities for the Greek diaspora and so on. In a way Christian Churches are like this, in that Christians gather to remember a distant homeland. The difference is that those who gather to remember earthly homelands remember a place they have come from. Christians gather to remember a place they are going to.

As Peter Abelard put it once in a hymn:

Now in the meanwhile, with hearts raised on high
We for that country must yearn and must sigh
Seeking Jerusalem, dear native land
Through our long exile on Babylon’s strand.

Some Christians, however, have found that the weekly gatherings of the Christian community are not enough. The “little kingdom” of the Christian family is not enough. They have looked for a more permanent expression. And so there have been monastic communities, which are, in the sense in which we are discussing it, utopian communities par excellence, trying to live the life of the heavenly kingdom on earth. As one monk put it, monasteries are the lungs of the church. In this world we breathe the polluted air of a broken and sinful world, but in the monasteries we breathe the pure air of heaven.

Christians are essentially eccentric, and Christian communities are eccentric communities. Eccentricity is another way of expressing the idea of utopia. It is having a different centre.

In his novel Perelandra C.S. Lewis conveyed the idea of eccentricity by describing eldila (angels) as appearing to people looking at them with earthly eyes as standing at a slant. When we stand, a line from our head through our feet, if extended, points to the gravitational centre of the earth. But the eldila are aligned on a different centre, and so to earth-bound mortals they appear slanted.

The “utopian” theme of this Synchroblog was inspired by an earlier post by John Morehead: Morehead’s Musings: Searching for Utopia, and it has also been discussed a little in the Christianity and society discussion forum. John’s post is a good introduction to the theme, and he includes some examples of utopian intentional communities.

Communes or intentional communities are not necessarily utopian. Many of them have quite mundane aims. To qualify as “utopian” a community needs to have an intention not merely to live together, but to create or express a way of life that is different from that of the society around them, or at least based on different values. A utopian community must be, in some sense, countercultural — in other words, eccentric.

I’ve written about this before, then, as now, inspired by something that John Morehead wrote: Notes from underground: Morehead’s Musings: Symbolic Countercultures and Rituals of Opposition, so I won’t reiterate the whole thing here. The main point then was that the so called new monasticism needs to be supported by and linked to the old monasticism.

There have been many more dreams and visions of utopian communities than there have been actual examples. We need the dreams and visions, perhaps, but there is also the danger that Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns of in his book Life together:

Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream… He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and ernest and sacrificial.

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions the visionary ideal of a community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself. Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ long before we entered into common life with them, we enter that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients.

Other synchrobloggers:

• Nudity, Innocence, and Christian Distopia at Phil Wyman’s Square No More
• Utopia Today: Living Above Consumerism at Be the Revolution
• Nowhere Will Be Here at Igneous Quill
• A This-Worldly Faith at Elizaphanian
• Bridging the Gap at Calacirian
• The Ostrich and the Utopian Myth at Decompressing Faith
• Being Content in the Present at One Hand Clapping
• Eternity in their Hearts by Tim Abbott
• Relationship – The catch-22 of the Internet Utopia at Jeremiah’s Blog
• U-topia or My-topia? at On Earth as in Heaven
• A SecondLife Utopia at Mike’s Musings
• Mrs. Brown and the Kingdom of God at Eternal Echoes
• John Morehead at John Morehead’s Musings

Social blogrolling – controversy on MyBlogLog

There’s been a bit of a tempest in a tea cup over a new feature of MyBlogLog — the ability to send messages to all one’s community members.

Some, like Meg in Australia, have complained that it is spam, but it seems that those who are complaining have joined hundreds of communities that they have no real interest in.

And I disagree. I think being able to send a message to all one’s community members (provided it is not overdone) is a good thing. Perhaps some will abuse the facility by sending spam, but then the answer is simple — leave their community. But a message once a quarter or even once a month should not be a problem.

I think “community” means that one desires to interact with others in the community. If people join communities on MyBlogLog and similar social networking sites, they ought to be interested in the topics of the community and in interaction with the members. If they do not want to communicate, they should not have joined the community in the first place.

In my blogs I have tried to make it clear what I am interested in and what I blog about, and I do that in MyBlogLog too. I hope that people who are interested in similar things will read my blogs and comment, and join my communities in MyBlogLog so we can keep in touch, and so I will be reminded to look at their blogs occasionally.

But some people seem to join communities just to see how many they can collect. I have difficulty in understanding the motivation for joining a community where one has no interest in anything the community is about. If you join a football club, and have no interest in football, why did you join? If you then object to receiving the club newsletter, don’t complain to the post office about the club sending you the newsletter, just resign from the club.

I have the same problem with people on social networking sites like MySpace, whom I’ve never heard of, saying “I want to be your friend”. If they’ve read and commented on my blog, or we’ve discussed things in a newsgroup, or exchanged e-mail or snail mail, or communicated in some other way, fine. But just to be a “friend” with no discernable common interest with me makes no sense.

One of the problems of electronic networking is that it can lead to communication without community. But the sudden demand from people on MyBlogLog for community without communication is far more difficult to understand.

Urban monasticism

Someone created this forum/web meeting place for people interested in urban monasticism. It seems to be for people of any religion or tradition who are interested in different kinds of semi-monastic life.

I’ve been interested in such things for a long time, and at one time, with some friends, formed the Community of St Simon the Zealot in Windhoek, Namibia. Not true monasticism, but at a time when the idea of communes was quite popular, we hoped it might be a semi-monastic or “intentional community”.

I thought of an Orthodox example, Mother Maria Skobtsova, and wonder if there are any others.

Thinking about it a bit more, I think that if any Orthodox Christians wanted to do such a thing, they should be within range of a full “proper” monastery, which they should visit regularly.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on this suchject, or know of any examples? If so, please comment, either here or on the urban monasticism site.

Technorati tags: Orthodox monasticism, urban monasticism