What does the concept of friendship in the Facebook age have to do with Christian Easter themes of life, death and resurrection? It's all about love, discovers Shane Gilchrist.
Lynne Baab has been engaged in conversations about friendship since she was a child.
By the time she was 15, she had moved house 12 times. As the furniture was rearranged so, too, were relationships. When it comes to fresh starts, Dr Baab is an expert.
She also knows a little something about Christianity (she is the Jack Somerville Lecturer in Pastoral Theology in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Otago) and electronic media (in 2007 she completed a PhD in communication at the University of Washington).
Thus qualified to join a few dots, Dr Baab sees "some very interesting" connections between Easter and friendship.
"Look at Jesus and the Easter story; it is about betrayal, death and resurrection. That is what happens in friendships. You have conflicts and misunderstandings and a constant process of overcoming a sense of betrayal - big or small - and allowing yourself to have a fresh start within a friendship."
Besides the role of forgiveness in a relationship, equally important is a willingness to take the initiative, as is the ability to alter ingrained friendship patterns, Dr Baab says.
"The idea of a fresh start really runs through the whole of the Bible. Even in the Old Testament there is that word 'repentance', which means 'turn', or to turn away. Are we open to those turns in our friendships?
"Part of the challenge in friendship is always being willing to allow something new to happen, the affirmation of new things. I heard story after story of friendships that morphed well into the relationship.
"One really interesting connection between Easter and friendship via Facebook and other new communication technologies is that Easter is, in part, about new things. Yet many people resist new communication technologies. We can't say that everything new is good, but something about Easter encourages us to be open to new things."
Although the genesis of Dr Baab's book is firmly rooted in the uprooting she experienced as a child ("I've been talking about friendship with my mum and brother since I was 6 or 7 years old ..."), her PhD studies into new media and recent debate about the role of friendship in an online context added to her motivation.
"The overlap with my childhood issues of engagement and the challenges of new media meant I just had to write about it."
Dr Baab says many of those to whom she spoke regard social networking sites as just one means of communication. Though some talked about friendships with people they hadn't actually met, "everybody" said face-to-face interaction was best.
"Critics are saying Facebook takes away the need to meet people, that it has created a generation that doesn't need face-to-face contact ... That's absurd. We communicate in multiple ways to stay close to people we care about. Sceptics are too simplistic in how they view these forms of communication.
"I feel what is going on in the wider conversation about Facebook and texting and stuff is a lot of black-and-white thinking. Everyone wants to see electronic communication as either good or bad."
The challenge, Dr Baab says, is to work out how to use social-networking sites wisely.
Let's use Facebook as an example (after all, it does boast more than 600 million users). With its inherent levels of access to another person's profile comes the flip side: you might be excluded, or have your invitation to "be my friend" ignored. Ouch.
Yet Dr Baab believes there are worse things than being denied the ability to see someone's wall/photos/mood status.
"I think that's not so much a problem as flippant, cryptic, unintentionally rude comments. You might try to be clever or try to sound cool so you make some mean comment instead of saying 'I was thinking about you in your job interview'.
"It's really important to be clever in a kind way rather than being cold or flippant. I think that is one of the biggest challenges with all this brief communication. We say it's only teenagers who want to look good, but don't we all want to?
Don't we all want to sound articulate?
"The challenge is to get beyond sounding cool to showing love for other people. That is hugely important to me and is significantly connected to Jesus. This is a man who touched the leper, who listened to people tell long, needy stories, a man who cared.
"That's what I've tried to do with the book, to express the things we really need to be thinking about."
The description of the internet as an information highway might be cliche, but it is apt. And social networking, personal web pages, blogs etc are another popular route for gleaning facts, fiction and, sometimes, fiction dressed as fact.
Yet such a wealth of information leads to voyeuristic temptation, Dr Baab warns.
"It encourages us to 'cruise' the information. That's OK if it's a bunch of newspaper articles but, when it is information about human beings and their lives and what they care about, then it easily becomes a form of voyeurism where we are merely collecting details about other people."
On the plus side, experiences related via a social-networking site might allow an insight into a person's experiences, be they a series of good or bad events.
"One of my arguments regarding online communication is the need to slow down, particularly when we are reading details about someone we care about.
"Imagine what they are going through or dealing with; stop and pray for them if you are someone who prays; send them an email or a Facebook message or ring them; let them know you are thinking about them," Dr Baab says.
"That's where we come back to the question: what does love look like in an online setting? I think we have to ask how we can learn to show love using Facebook. Sometimes, expressing love involves changing the mode of communication. You do something in addition to posting something online.
"It's affirmation: 'You just had an exam? How did that go?' 'You just saw your boyfriend for the first time in 10 days? How was that?' It is about that constant, supportive connection."
Not surprisingly, many teenagers interviewed by Dr Baab revealed that social networking and texting were integral means by which they shared experiences. However, older age groups were also well-represented.
"I had people in their 20s talking about the addictive nature of some forms of electronic communication. I heard people in their 30s say they would write really long emails to their friends then others in the 30s say they don't read long emails. Within generations there are differences in the ways people communicate.
"I talked to a 70-year-old woman who told me she had gotten her first cellphone a couple of years earlier and loves to get text messages from her siblings. She said she was checking her cellphone every five minutes; she had to put it in a closet and only go to it when it was making a noise. She sounded exactly like some teenagers.
"People of all ages are using electronic communication - and people of all ages are not using it, or are using it reluctantly."
Dr Baab also discovered a common conundrum: many of those who lamented feeling lonely also conceded they struggled to initiate in friendships.
"I believe that the single most important friendship skill is the ability to initiate.
"It might involve going on Facebook and looking at what your friends have posted and then commenting. It might mean sending a text message or email or making a phone call, or walking across the street to knock on someone's door.
"At work, it might mean walking across the hall and plopping yourself down and saying, 'the last two times I've seen you in the hall you've looked sad - I've got a few minutes so tell me about it'.
"This is another tie-in with Easter. The act of Jesus coming to Earth was an act of initiative on God's part to connect with human beings. Jesus came to Earth to show God's love, to show the initiative of God's love towards people.
"As Christians, we believe Jesus' life, death and resurrection is the ultimate reflection of God's love for us and God's acceptance of us - who we really are as opposed to who we should be.
"That's what we experience in a good friendship - that acceptance of who we are," Dr Baab says.
"When we try to love our friends we aren't inventing love; we were created in the image of the God of love. We are entering into something we were created for. I think that is very soothing."
• The book
Friending: Real Relationships in a Virtual World (InterVarsity Press) will be released in New Zealand in mid May.
