The New Thing

But many Americans are bereft of people to lean on. The demise of tight-knit communities has had a profound effect on us. We’re increasingly living our lives on the Internet, alone amid vast digital crowds. Social media have replaced socializing. We’re all guilty of staring too often at our phones. We curl up at night with the latest Chrome browser.

The loneliness is killing us.
Soaring suicides are another sign of our toxic social disconnect (By the way, I'm not sure I recommend following this link. Some of the ads this site serves up a pretty sketchy.)

But this individual, isolated experience of church is the poorer one for those of us who are able to go. (Live-streaming services are of course important for the homebound.)  In an era when everything from dates to grocery delivery can be scheduled and near instant, church attendance shouldn’t be one more thing to get from an app. We can be members of a body best when we are all together — we can mourn when we observe and wipe away tears, just as we can rejoice when we can share smiles and have face-to-face conversations. Studies show that regular attendance at religious services correlates with better sleep, lower blood pressure in older adults and a reduced risk of suicide. I doubt these same phenomena occur when online church is substituted for the real thing, because the truth is that community is good for us. We need one another.
Internet Church Isn’t Really Church

I admit to being an old man. After all, I'm a Gen Xer, and the last of us rolled off the assembly line when Jimmy Carter was still President of the United States (depending on how you slice your age cohorts, anyway). But hopefully, I'll never grow so old that I can't appreciate the fact that things can be done in a whole new way, and that can still be the right way.

Technology allows change. The tight-knit communities and in-person-only church services of the past didn't suit everyone's needs. And the technology of social media and streaming events allows people to get something they want without having to pay at least some of the price that those older structures demanded. People don't invent new ways of doing things simply because they have nothing better to do with themselves. They do it in order to solve problems. And those problems don't have to be relevant, or even visible, to everyone else.

Making friends remotely via social media or meeting spiritual needs via streaming webcast allow people to have a different experience than the one I grew up with, where meeting new people required encountering them in person, and most community churches had no way of granting access to more people than could fit in the pews at one time. And I can understand how someone whose life had only ever included direct interactions with the people they called friends
or going to a specific building to worship their deity of choice would understand these as lesser options.

But when I was a child, I didn't go hunting around the neighborhood for new children to meet because I'd done some sort of cost-benefit analysis version a dozen other options. It was simply the only way I knew to go about it. Logging onto a social media site and "following" someone who seemed interesting simply wasn't a thing when I was high-school student in the 1980s. And so I made that work, and I spent years honing the efficiencies of it, until I'd gotten to the point where it was a well-oiled machine. And so is it easier for me to socialize in person than via social media? Sure. But I'm pretty sure that the more or less 30 years of practice that I'd had before Facebook and company came along have something to do with that.

We are not the end of history. Just like our grandparents weren't. The world will continue to change and grow, and people will create new ways of doing things that other people believe have already been perfected, up until the day that they pass from the world. There was a time when the only way to see a movie was to go to the theater. And before then, the only way to see the performance of a story was to see it enacted live on stage. You can make the point that for each transition, something was lost. And yeah, I like to go to the show with friends, and when I watch movies on my couch, it's not quite the same. But the moviegoing experience of my childhood is different, rather than better.

Technology doesn't mean that we have to be lonely, or cut off from vibrant faith communities. The epidemic of suicide can be solved, and people can attain better sleep with the new tools at their disposal. People will create the means to obtain the benefits that they want in their lives.

The New York Post article concludes with "Let’s be the people who step in when someone is hurting or in trouble. Let’s put down our phones and laptops and make connections on our blocks and in our neighborhoods."

I have a better idea. Let's find ways to allow us to have the same connections, via phone and laptop, with someone a nation away just as easily as we can make a connection across the street or around the corner. Being there for someone doesn't have to mean being there with someone. Let's support the ways in which new technologies can create the richness and depth that we understood that our old ways of doing things did.