Chapter 9 covered by Graham Brenna as part of our Group Blogging Project discussing the book Flickering Pixels by Shane Hipps. If you need a quick overview to what Flickering Pixels is about, please go here.
The shared experience… what a great representation of community!
We share our experiences with others by talking with them face to face or on a cell phone, sure. But we also have the ability to share our experiences with many people at once via facebook, YouTube, blogging and many other online tools. Those of us in the blogging group that are reading this book are reading it by ourselves on our own time, but we’re sharing our experiences with each other and many others through ChurchCrunch! We are connected to a much larger shared experience… blogging FTW!
If you are a regular reader of ChurchCrunch, you are part of a tribe… a ChurchCrunch tribe! We are sharing this experience with each other. I have made what I call “twiends” (twitter friends) with a few people that belong to this tribe and have met not even a handful of you in person!
However, according to Feedburner, there are now over 1,600 of you that are potentially reading this! We are sharing the same experience and we don’t even know each other! Whoa… total mind blow! Or maybe not a total mind blow… as we have all become accustomed to sharing experiences with each other even though we don’t know each other.
I would venture to guess that many of you ChurchCrunch tribe members are also part of another tribe, the late-nite NBC tribe, and are aware of the late-night game of musical chairs that has taken place on NBC this year with Leno, Conan and Fallon. For many of us, that is a shared experience, even though we don’t know each other.
Cell phones are great tools for connecting people, there is no doubt about that. For the last two years one of my best friends, Dan, has been living in El Salvador and working as a missionary while I have stayed at home in Naperville, IL. He moved home today and popped his head in my office, just minutes before I sat down to write this blog post! Over the last two years I have only seen him twice when he briefly came home for Christmas or something.
Other than that… our relationship had shifted from hanging out all the time to a cell phone relationship. It was hard at first but we made an effort to talk with each other at least once a month… and usually it was more frequently than that. But our cell phones kept our relationship going.
Now that he is home, we won’t rely on our cell phones as much to keep our friendship strong. If we were to not hang out now, even though he is less than 15 minutes away, and were to keep our friendship a “cell phone friendship” things would be different. We would likely not be good friends after awhile.
Yes, cell phones, facebook, and blogs are great… but they should never completely replace spending physical time with the people you love!
What are your thoughts about “shared experience” in light of Shane’s writings?
Susan_Stewart says
Having built a foundation, Hipps is now building on that foundation with some thought-provoking words.
I paused to wonder about these distant "friendships." How many folks consider a celebrity a friend because of a Twitter follow or Facebook connection? On the other hand, how many friendships have been revived because of the new ability to connect across space and time?
I don't follow many celebrities. Those that I do follow have interesting things to say (or maybe their paid "friends" have interesting things to say). Because I live where many "stars" hide away, I've seen the worts so prefer the person over the star. I don't consider any of them my friend, and I doubt I would attend a party if invited over Twitter.
On the other hand, I recently connected with my best friend from high school through email. Interestingly, due to illness she doesn't remember much of high school, so our friendship is renewing in the now rather the then. We would not have this connection without the new technology.
The expanded tribal experience is so many other societal changes — good and bad can be expected. I appreciate certain tribal experiences, like this one. Others I withdraw from, preferring to closer personal experience.
Graham Brenna says
Amen Sista! While the online tribes and shared experiences I've become a part of will never replace the face-to-face friendships I have, it is a nice supplemental community. One with many different viewpoints than the people whom I surround myself with. 🙂
dewde says
I think it can be harder for the older generation to realize just how deep and authentic an online relationship can be. I ran a website dedicated to helping teens that struggled with porn addiction for a few years. It was basically a tribe of mostly Christian teens that felt confined to their own minds. They had youth group and bible studies and high school cliques and youth pastors and mentors and well meaning parents… but what they didn't have was a safe group of peers, or adults, where they felt they could say, "I'm not perfect and I struggle with pornography."
We cried together. We prayed together. We held each other up and encouraged each other. We celebrated each others victories and grieved each others defeats.
In the span of 3 years we intervened in several suicide threats, a few sexual molestation accusations, parents who didn't care and parents who over-reacted. We had cutters and liars and homosexuals and heterosexuals and chronic "self gratifiers". We had teens that made Craigslist dates. You name it, we saw it.
For most of us, we never saw each others faces. We were just digital words on a screen. We loved each other in a pure, clean sense of the word, and we love each other still even though I turned the community over to the next group of leaders.
Online relationships can be more real and authentic than real life ones because we have nothing to lose. We can be our real, honest selves almost immediately without the fear of losing the love or respect of a Mom or a Dad or a friend forever.
Part of the problem with the online world is that you are free to be anonymous and you find yourself doing things you would never do in front of other people. But part of the beauty of the online world is the same exact thing. It can be a liberating place to find a rag-tag band of lost souls just like you where you can finally be free to say, "I hurt" and know that the person on the other side of the screen has felt the exact same pain.
peace|dewde
Daniel_Berman says
I think what you just highlighted was the need for balance in any relationship. Its not that offline vs. online is any more authentic, its that its a different flavor of authenticity. The secret is finding ways to appreciate both, and not exclude one for the other….Awesome thoughts!
Graham Brenna says
I agree with you. It's not that face-to-face is better than communicating via the interwebs or a cell phone… they each have their place in our society. The same discussion is being had about doing church online. http://bit.ly/9fhmf