Facebook: Aristotle's Nightmare?

Having finally gotten some material together and figured out how to use the HASTAC website, I guess it's time I posted a blog entry.

I'm an undergraduate at Baylor University.  I'm in the University Scholars program so technically that is my major, but I've been working toward an emphasis in Film & Digital Media.  Last semester I took a "New Media Studies" course under Dr. Gardner Campbell which I definitely got a lot out of, from that Dr. Campbell nominated me to represent Baylor in HASTAC.  Aside from that course and my major I've been interested in media technologies for a pretty long time, I run a film/video website called BricksInMotion and have created some short animated films.

A few weeks ago, now, Dean Thomas Hibbs of the Honors College at Baylor gave his annual lecture, which usually focuses on contemporary culture, often tying into recent films and the like.  The primary emphasis this year was social media, such as Facebook.  In this year's lecture he opened with a story about a girl who was walking through New York City, texting as she walked, and fell into a manhole because she was oblivious to her surroundings.  He noted the similarity of the phenomenon caused by increased pervasion of technology in our daily lives to what Walker Percy called "Angelism," a separation of the mind from material constrains.

Dean Hibbs contended that excessive abstraction creates a voyeuristic culture in which many people are more interested in observing experiences than actually experiencing them.  He pointed to the popular shows The Simpsons and Seinfeld, which both draw most of their humor from observation.

Hibbs also made an interesting connection of Facebook and other social media to Aristotle's ideas on friendship.  Many of us have hundreds or thousands of "friends" on facebook, which by Aristotle's measures would probably all fit under friends of utility or of pleasure, with very few, if any, of shared virtue.  Have we lost a degree of being able to have deep friendships of virtue because of the number of contacts we have today?  "The unexamined life is not worth living," but when we become detached from reality via social networking and other technologies, Hibbs contends that we reach a point where "the unlived life is not worth examining."

As I was sitting in this lecture, hearing Dean Hibbs speak on disconnection and abstraction from the world around us due to technology, I noticed the person sitting next to me spent most of the lecture sending and receiving text messages on his phone.