"Crackbook" - what are you giving up for Lent?
"Pax Vobiscum Brother Prowse, Pax Vobiscum!"
Joshua Prowse, a computer teacher at Calgary's Lester B. Pearson high school has given up Facebook for Lent. He began his 46 day quest February 25th and will log back in April 12th. However he will continue to Twitter.Lent's Most Controversial Sacrifice: Facebook
ERIN ANDERSSEN
Globe and Mail
March 6, 2009
Joshua Prowse gave up alcohol for a year in 2007. Now he's trying to give up Facebook for Lent – a mere 40 days without his digital touchstone.
Guess which one he thinks will be harder. (Hint: Last year, vowing a Facebook ban for his New Year's resolution, he barely lasted a week.)
“There's a reason why they call it Crackbook,” laughs the 35-year-old Calgary high-school teacher, whose Lenten sacrifice is a personal test of will rather than a religious observance. (Also, an attractive woman asked him what he was giving up for Lent, and he thought this might impress her.)
It's a contemporary take on the traditional Christian practice of giving up something to represent the 40 days that Jesus fasted in the desert.
Mr. Prowse has chosen to abstain from twice-daily fixes on the social-networking site, which often lasted for hours.
Ten days in, he is already struggling – though, to be fair, he teaches computer science, surrounded daily by dozens of tempting keyboards.
“I have that smoker's moment, when I get twitchy. It's been difficult.”
Mr. Prowse can take some solace in knowing that he is not the only one in withdrawal. In Italy, several Catholic bishops have urged their flocks to embark on similar Lenten tech breaks.
Facebook and its social-networking sister sites have now become so ubiquitous that even Pope Benedict XVI, not the trendiest of pontiffs, is paying attention – praising its ability to bring people together, with a mild caution against “obsessive” use, and taking his own show to YouTube.
But even while some Christians sign off for the month, the debate about the vices and virtues of the Web continues unabated: Is our Facebook fixation an impending social ill, or the secret to saving community? The answer may depend on how we use it.
A pair of senior British scientists sparked a Facebook backlash this winter by arguing – in one case, before the House of Lords – that online socializing may make us not only sick, but stupid, evolutionarily speaking.
Their research, dismissed as “twaddle” by less delicate Internet watchers, has nonetheless inspired a great many blog lines on the merits of virtual hangouts, and postings of pro-Web papers to suggest that cutting off Facebook will neither protect you from cancer nor save brain cells, but may douse the liveliness of your social circle.
To sum up the research divide: Late last month, Susan Greenfield, a pre-eminent neuroscientist at Oxford, warned the British Parliament that if our tech obsession continues “the mid-21st-century mind might be almost infantilized” by the psychological effects of onscreen friendships.
Young brains, she suggested, are being trained to process fast-action, instant images, potentially harming their ability to manage social behaviours off-screen. Drawing a comparison to the way people today rarely witness an animal being butchered but eat meat from a package, she suggested that “perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror” to the messiness and unpredictability of real-time human interactions.
Psychologist Aric Sigman sounded a more immediate alarm a few weeks earlier by suggesting in Biologist magazine that spending too much time online – along with watching television and listening to iPods during family dinner – was leading to loneliness, and that loneliness has been convincingly linked to diseases such as diabetes and cancer, even dementia. Though his paper never specifically names Facebook, it inspired the doomsday headline: Facebook Causes Cancer.
“Those are just old people who do not use the technology and do not have a social life,” scoffs Mr. Prowse, who says his students use the Internet largely to organize their real-life friendships, not replace them. “Facebook is a tool. Is a hammer good or bad? It depends on how you use it.”
And there's plenty of research to support the Facebook-rules position.
Despite the dire forecast of the Internet's early years, people don't devote their online time to drifting among strangers; one of the keys to Facebook's success is that participants aren't anonymous.
Studies have shown that far from being a loner's haven, the Internet is the playground of socially engaged kids – and increasingly, their parents and grandparents, who use the Web to bolster their real-world relationships – and to link to friends who are less likely these days to live a few doors down the street.
“It's tempting when you see a kid sitting in front of a screen when there are no real humans around, to think that's an isolating activity,” says Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine. “But it's actually not.”
People who spend more time on the Internet may actually have more friends, according to an upcoming study co-written by Barry Wellman, a senior sociologist at the University of Toronto specializing in the Internet. The findings indicate that social-networking sites are a potential antidote to loneliness. Dr. Wellman says researchers often make the mistake of blending all technology use together and then assuming it has a common impact on everyone.
A Statistics Canada study in December, which Dr. Wellman also co-wrote, revealed a more complex story. Internet users may be less likely to have dinner with their families – a daily ritual in decline across the board – but they were no less likely to talk to close family members, and were more likely to stay in touch by phone. The most common uses for the Web were socializing and making plans to socialize. In this way, sites like Facebook brought people together more often.
For rural Canadians and new immigrants, who often live far from family, the Internet was even more important.
And for Canadians suffering through a long, cold winter, social-networking sites may be the next best thing to eggnog with friends. Cutting that connection, Dr. Wellman suggests, “is not divinely inspired.”
At the same time, even the most avid users of the Internet admit that frivolous online socializing can easily absorb too much of your life.
Facebook, Mr. Prowse says, “is like a garage sale of friends' information. It's full of crap, but there's one or two good pieces, and if you sift through the other stuff, it's very rewarding.”
But declaring a Facebook moratorium can be a freeing experience, suggests Anne Jackson, a writer and assistant to the senior pastor at Cross Point Church in Nashville, who has also decided to give up Facebook for Lent, along with her blog and Twitter, a Web application that allows quick musings to friends.
When Ms. Jackson's husband began to learn about her day mainly from her blog, she decided that her Internet obsession had gone too far. She was spending hours worrying about her posts, checking for comments, responding to e-mails.
When she visited Tweetwaster.com to get a tally of the messages she had sent using Twitter, she discovered that over a year and a half she had spent two full days sending more than 5,000 messages: “Move out of your mom's basement and get a life!” the program told her.
Some of the messages she sent were about charities, but 99.9 per cent of them were “completely self-involved,” she concedes. “Who cares if I'm stuck in traffic? Why do we put it there? It just adds to the noise.”
Since Lent began, she has had three dinners with friends, and her husband is teasing that she is talking too much. “There's something meaningful about meeting face to face, and getting the full experience,” she says. “Now that I have stepped back, my brain is starting to relax.”
The story of the Internet is still waiting to be told either way, it's going to be a complex mix of pros and cons. In that environment, Dr. Ito suggests, the question is not whether we should be online, but what we do when we get there. We have to control the Internet, not the other way around.
That can be complicated: The generation gaps have left a baffled cohort of parents, who can no longer be unobtrusive observers of their children's social lives by tracking who calls on the family phone at night and who hangs out for after-school snacks in the kitchen. And it has created a new set of pitfalls for teenagers, who may be reckless about sending racy pictures to their boyfriends and won't get a second chance at discretion.
New research is focusing on issues such as privacy, anonymity and how young people can be taught responsible Internet use. In one recent study, a doctor of adolescent medicine at the University of Washington tested what happened when she sent online notes to teenagers who had talked about sex and alcohol online. “Are you sure that's a good idea?” she asked. “After all, if I could see it, nearly anybody could.” Three months later, nearly half of the young people she contacted had changed their online profiles or blocked access to strangers.
Still, with so much social capital invested in being perpetually present, self-imposed exile has its risks. To cover off the etiquette of vanishing from the online world for 40 days without offending anyone, one blogger has helpfully given Facebook fasters a set of guidelines. Included on the list: changing your photo to announce your plans and making note of birthdays that get flagged through Facebook so you don't get grief for forgetting them.
Back in Calgary, Joshua Prowse continues his second week Facebook-free. He has posted a notice on his page telling friends about his fast, but he is worried that any old chums contacting him for the first time might think he is a jerk for not answering their new friend requests right away. On the plus side, he is being spared the endless collection of cooing new-baby pictures that land on his page.
But he can rest easy knowing it will all be waiting for him come Easter Sunday. “I am going to have a Facebook binge when it's all over,” he says. “Think how awesome it's going to be: The first day I go back and I've got 200 e-mails. That's what I keep telling myself.”
ERIN ANDERSSEN
Globe and Mail
March 6, 2009
Joshua Prowse gave up alcohol for a year in 2007. Now he's trying to give up Facebook for Lent – a mere 40 days without his digital touchstone.
Guess which one he thinks will be harder. (Hint: Last year, vowing a Facebook ban for his New Year's resolution, he barely lasted a week.)
“There's a reason why they call it Crackbook,” laughs the 35-year-old Calgary high-school teacher, whose Lenten sacrifice is a personal test of will rather than a religious observance. (Also, an attractive woman asked him what he was giving up for Lent, and he thought this might impress her.)
It's a contemporary take on the traditional Christian practice of giving up something to represent the 40 days that Jesus fasted in the desert.
Mr. Prowse has chosen to abstain from twice-daily fixes on the social-networking site, which often lasted for hours.
Ten days in, he is already struggling – though, to be fair, he teaches computer science, surrounded daily by dozens of tempting keyboards.
“I have that smoker's moment, when I get twitchy. It's been difficult.”
Mr. Prowse can take some solace in knowing that he is not the only one in withdrawal. In Italy, several Catholic bishops have urged their flocks to embark on similar Lenten tech breaks.
Facebook and its social-networking sister sites have now become so ubiquitous that even Pope Benedict XVI, not the trendiest of pontiffs, is paying attention – praising its ability to bring people together, with a mild caution against “obsessive” use, and taking his own show to YouTube.
But even while some Christians sign off for the month, the debate about the vices and virtues of the Web continues unabated: Is our Facebook fixation an impending social ill, or the secret to saving community? The answer may depend on how we use it.
A pair of senior British scientists sparked a Facebook backlash this winter by arguing – in one case, before the House of Lords – that online socializing may make us not only sick, but stupid, evolutionarily speaking.
Their research, dismissed as “twaddle” by less delicate Internet watchers, has nonetheless inspired a great many blog lines on the merits of virtual hangouts, and postings of pro-Web papers to suggest that cutting off Facebook will neither protect you from cancer nor save brain cells, but may douse the liveliness of your social circle.
To sum up the research divide: Late last month, Susan Greenfield, a pre-eminent neuroscientist at Oxford, warned the British Parliament that if our tech obsession continues “the mid-21st-century mind might be almost infantilized” by the psychological effects of onscreen friendships.
Young brains, she suggested, are being trained to process fast-action, instant images, potentially harming their ability to manage social behaviours off-screen. Drawing a comparison to the way people today rarely witness an animal being butchered but eat meat from a package, she suggested that “perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror” to the messiness and unpredictability of real-time human interactions.
Psychologist Aric Sigman sounded a more immediate alarm a few weeks earlier by suggesting in Biologist magazine that spending too much time online – along with watching television and listening to iPods during family dinner – was leading to loneliness, and that loneliness has been convincingly linked to diseases such as diabetes and cancer, even dementia. Though his paper never specifically names Facebook, it inspired the doomsday headline: Facebook Causes Cancer.
“Those are just old people who do not use the technology and do not have a social life,” scoffs Mr. Prowse, who says his students use the Internet largely to organize their real-life friendships, not replace them. “Facebook is a tool. Is a hammer good or bad? It depends on how you use it.”
And there's plenty of research to support the Facebook-rules position.
Despite the dire forecast of the Internet's early years, people don't devote their online time to drifting among strangers; one of the keys to Facebook's success is that participants aren't anonymous.
Studies have shown that far from being a loner's haven, the Internet is the playground of socially engaged kids – and increasingly, their parents and grandparents, who use the Web to bolster their real-world relationships – and to link to friends who are less likely these days to live a few doors down the street.
“It's tempting when you see a kid sitting in front of a screen when there are no real humans around, to think that's an isolating activity,” says Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine. “But it's actually not.”
People who spend more time on the Internet may actually have more friends, according to an upcoming study co-written by Barry Wellman, a senior sociologist at the University of Toronto specializing in the Internet. The findings indicate that social-networking sites are a potential antidote to loneliness. Dr. Wellman says researchers often make the mistake of blending all technology use together and then assuming it has a common impact on everyone.
A Statistics Canada study in December, which Dr. Wellman also co-wrote, revealed a more complex story. Internet users may be less likely to have dinner with their families – a daily ritual in decline across the board – but they were no less likely to talk to close family members, and were more likely to stay in touch by phone. The most common uses for the Web were socializing and making plans to socialize. In this way, sites like Facebook brought people together more often.
For rural Canadians and new immigrants, who often live far from family, the Internet was even more important.
And for Canadians suffering through a long, cold winter, social-networking sites may be the next best thing to eggnog with friends. Cutting that connection, Dr. Wellman suggests, “is not divinely inspired.”
At the same time, even the most avid users of the Internet admit that frivolous online socializing can easily absorb too much of your life.
Facebook, Mr. Prowse says, “is like a garage sale of friends' information. It's full of crap, but there's one or two good pieces, and if you sift through the other stuff, it's very rewarding.”
But declaring a Facebook moratorium can be a freeing experience, suggests Anne Jackson, a writer and assistant to the senior pastor at Cross Point Church in Nashville, who has also decided to give up Facebook for Lent, along with her blog and Twitter, a Web application that allows quick musings to friends.
When Ms. Jackson's husband began to learn about her day mainly from her blog, she decided that her Internet obsession had gone too far. She was spending hours worrying about her posts, checking for comments, responding to e-mails.
When she visited Tweetwaster.com to get a tally of the messages she had sent using Twitter, she discovered that over a year and a half she had spent two full days sending more than 5,000 messages: “Move out of your mom's basement and get a life!” the program told her.
Some of the messages she sent were about charities, but 99.9 per cent of them were “completely self-involved,” she concedes. “Who cares if I'm stuck in traffic? Why do we put it there? It just adds to the noise.”
Since Lent began, she has had three dinners with friends, and her husband is teasing that she is talking too much. “There's something meaningful about meeting face to face, and getting the full experience,” she says. “Now that I have stepped back, my brain is starting to relax.”
The story of the Internet is still waiting to be told either way, it's going to be a complex mix of pros and cons. In that environment, Dr. Ito suggests, the question is not whether we should be online, but what we do when we get there. We have to control the Internet, not the other way around.
That can be complicated: The generation gaps have left a baffled cohort of parents, who can no longer be unobtrusive observers of their children's social lives by tracking who calls on the family phone at night and who hangs out for after-school snacks in the kitchen. And it has created a new set of pitfalls for teenagers, who may be reckless about sending racy pictures to their boyfriends and won't get a second chance at discretion.
New research is focusing on issues such as privacy, anonymity and how young people can be taught responsible Internet use. In one recent study, a doctor of adolescent medicine at the University of Washington tested what happened when she sent online notes to teenagers who had talked about sex and alcohol online. “Are you sure that's a good idea?” she asked. “After all, if I could see it, nearly anybody could.” Three months later, nearly half of the young people she contacted had changed their online profiles or blocked access to strangers.
Still, with so much social capital invested in being perpetually present, self-imposed exile has its risks. To cover off the etiquette of vanishing from the online world for 40 days without offending anyone, one blogger has helpfully given Facebook fasters a set of guidelines. Included on the list: changing your photo to announce your plans and making note of birthdays that get flagged through Facebook so you don't get grief for forgetting them.
Back in Calgary, Joshua Prowse continues his second week Facebook-free. He has posted a notice on his page telling friends about his fast, but he is worried that any old chums contacting him for the first time might think he is a jerk for not answering their new friend requests right away. On the plus side, he is being spared the endless collection of cooing new-baby pictures that land on his page.
But he can rest easy knowing it will all be waiting for him come Easter Sunday. “I am going to have a Facebook binge when it's all over,” he says. “Think how awesome it's going to be: The first day I go back and I've got 200 e-mails. That's what I keep telling myself.”
posted by Clare L. Pieuk at 6:43 AM
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