Facebook is killing your community.

the illusion of community in a divided age

I have a lot of partial posts hanging around - a toddler side effect. In fact, not much has gotten finished over the past two years - writing, potting benches, or travel plans. Many of you know the drill. Life really changes - spectacular changes but changes.

But like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, so too this post (cue the Days of our Lives theme). What type of butterfly? Who knows. Maybe a butterfly emerging only to find the zapper I bought off of Temu waiting. My Temu purchases - now there might be an interesting post (miniature rulers and tools and shorts oh my … and if you live in the general area and find a drone, it could be mine. Off to the east is the last I saw of it - and I followed the ‘quick start’ instructional video as best I could given the language barrier.

I am not too sure this post won’t offend or disappoint. On a number of levels, it makes me sad. But the fact that something makes you sad or disappoints or causes some real or perceived offense does not make it any less true…..

So, what is so sad or disappointing or potentially offensive you might ask. It’s this - you don’t have as many friends as you thought.

In 1993, British biological anthropologist and Oxford professor Robin Dunbar theorized that humans are only able to maintain up to 150 meaningful (stable) relationships.¹ There are lots of reasons why - all stemming from the size of our neocortex (the part of our brain responsible for consciousness). Above 150 and the ties that bind fray. What I am worried about is the possibility that they don’t fray gradually - it is more of a tensile-strength type situation and while there might be instances of unraveling, snaps are more the rule than exception.

I became fascinated with Dunbar’s theory when I first read Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point in 2000.² ‘Dunbar’s number’ of 150 seemed to explain a lot about what I was seeing in churches and organizations. Once groups reached a certain size, they seemed faced with a choice maintain in a lesser state or uncouple.

My interest in that aspect of group dynamics has a lot to do with family history and where I grew up. This isn’t a post about those things because I am not sure where I would begin, but it is enough to say that many of my ancestors were adherents to faith traditions that arose out of what is called the Radical Reformation. Many know about Martin Luther and his 95 theses in 1517, but eight years later another branch of the protestant reformation began in Germany (Happy 500th Anabaptists! [insert party hat emoji here - or maybe the ‘Nailed It! meme depending on your political affiliation]) - a movement that gave the world the Mennonites, Amish, and (less directly) Brethren. Those traditions differed in marked ways, but they shared a foundational belief in community. Whether it was in interpreting their religious texts or day to day life, community meant everything.³

Now how to get this on track with bogging down in a sociological/theological quagmire … Let’s just say very generally that Brethren (my family tradition, well at least for the past couple hundred years) tended through time to value community over doctrine. For them, keeping things together was more important than doing things the same way. Some would argue that such an approach ends up with a watered-down belief system (necessary so as to bridge people on different ends of the spectrum). Over time, such a group has a unified approach, but in theory a big tent.

Many in Mennonite and Amish traditions, on the other hand, tended to value doctrine above community. So, if people began doing things differently, rather than adapting the system to cover all, there was a split with one group doing things one way and a new group doing things another. Conform or continue on somewhere else. There are a lot of reasons for the differences between Brethren and Mennonite/Amish approaches - and for the historians amongst you they have mainly to do with the fact that the Brethren movement emerged in 1708 rather than 1525 and the world had turned a great deal in the intervening years.

Ugh, still in the mud, but I have chains.

A devotion to the idea of community, of course, isn’t specialized to Anabaptists, because however people describe it, a sense of belonging is critical to social development, motivation, and health.⁴ The seminal questions of conformity versus flexibility run right alongside the desire for community. People of all stripes crave belonging. Just as some crave steak and others Spaghetti-O’s (I ate them straight from the can when young and would today), when it comes to community, you say tomato and I say ketchup. The key to community is not the size or shape (well, there is the 150 part, but more on that later) but rather the belonging. The sense of tribe.

That desire to belong, for tribe, is a others have tried to mine for years. Whether hustlers or TV/Radio Preachers, all have realized and understood the deep desire to belong, seen a willingness to pay, and dug mines. Some paid out, others didn’t, but all operated with certain built-in limitations that existed because the world was big. Hustlers and Preachers were equally confined by the reach of tv and radio waves. But unlike the Tower of Babel, the Creator didn’t confuse programming languages fast enough to thwart the internet. Our world became small.

Without ‘big world’ curbs in place, tech companies have strip-mined our seams of desire for belonging and tribe. Those mines have paid off big time. Big tech realized that our need to belong can be satisfied by something less. Watered down whiskey will sell when water is the only other option at the bar.

Sheep farmers use a process called ‘crutching’ - they will shave the belly of a Ewe before it has a lamb so that the lamb can quickly find and ‘latch’ onto the teat to get its mom’s milk. Otherwise, a lamb might grasp a hold of and suck on a manure-filled clump of wool thinking it is the teat - and there just sucks away without the chance of any nourishment. Some lambs are lost simply because they keep sucking on dirty wool.

That is Facebook. That is X. That is Instagram. That is Tik-Tok. Manure-filled clumps of wool pretending to be what people need.⁵ It is faux community masquerading as the real thing. We look at the number of friends and followers we have and equate that on some level with having friends and followers - with being a part of something. With the illusion of belonging, many stop seeking belonging. On top of that we get addicted to the dopamine hits of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ and the equally potent drug of confrontation, battling other keyboard warriors and all the while thinking we are making some sort of impact.

In addition to the illusion of belonging, we run up against that pesky Dunbar number, where our neocortex is not even able to keep up with our 1000 faux friends and limited interactions. The world might have become small, but our biology has not adapted to allow us to maintain more real connections than Dunbar posited. Instead, we have given ourselves the double-whammy of a very small world with a huge faux community and the anxiety of feeling unable and inadequate to deal with it all.

So, let’s start out with the idea that we have all bought in to this idea - to one degree or another - that we are a part of social networks and communities. Add to that some degree of relying on those virtual connections instead of forging real connection in our own old-fashioned real world. Add to that the anxiety of dealing with all of those faux-connections, not to mention the algorithm-fueled feeds of information and ‘news.’

Mix that all up and fold it in with extreme polarization. It is a perfect storm.

All of a sudden, people in their large virtual communities stake out highly polarized positions and find out that what they thought was their tribe and community in fact is a collection of a bunch of people that have really wacky ideas - the illusion of shared cultures, ideals, and purposes snaps - it does not fray. And the snaps reach into the real world where real world connections are severed because peoples’ avatars (who are usually willing to be more vocal and absolutist than their ‘outies’) are all too willing to burn a path to the sea. In the real world, feelings (be they compassion and empathy or insecurity and imposter syndrome) and behaviors (encouraging or conflict avoidance) keep many from burning bridges too quickly. Not so for our virtual counterparts. Snap. Snap. Snap.

In the wake of the snap is disappointment, a feeling of naivete, loneliness, and anger. Those all breed increasingly polarized positions as people try to sift through their virtual community to find the remnant of their tribe. But get this, while finding their real tribe amongst the ashes of that earlier large faux community, they are usually locked in interactions (comments and posting) with their former faux friends and followers that they have come to realize are really neither. Somehow, we seem to treat our virtual communities like family gatherings where you are stuck with Uncle Jeff because he is family. People stay connected on Facebook, in many instances, when the only connection present is the easy identification of someone to disagree with.

So, what do we do? Lose the window into old friends’ lives and miss their joys and pains and the nudge to reach out and rekindle connections? Lose the birthday messages and the cat and dog videos that seem to make a lot of our days a little more joyful. Lose the recipes, vacation tips, and occasionally draw-dropping lessons? Well, for some of us, no. Some of us feel fairly confident we won’t know about anything or anyone without being force-fed their news. Others are ordering that watered-down whiskey, because they are afraid it is the only whiskey someone like them has available.

There seems to be good that comes from even faux-connection. It feels good to have someone wish us a happy birthday even if their phone told them to. But how do you keep the good amidst the community-killing bad? How do you protect yourself from the algorithms designed to sell and to keep you engaged - even if the engagement is because you are mad at someone or something. How do you keep the good when there is such a fine line between the cat video and letting virtual interactions cause you to sever decades-long real-world relationships with family and former friends?

I don’t know.

But like with a lot of things, I think knowing the questions or the shape of the problem is as important as having an immediate solution. I think we all need to start crutching though - shaving the belly of the world so that we can begin to get the nourishment we crave. So that we can find the real community we seek and can call bullshit on the tech companies that would have us burn our real communities in favor of their virtual ones.

Whether in red states or blue, and no matter our color, our creed, our tax bracket, or who we choose to love, we’ve got to figure out how to stop sucking on shitty wool.

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/004724849290081J?via%3Dihub#preview-section-abstract; https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/coevolution-of-neocortical-size-group-size-and-language-in-humans/4290FF4D7362511136B9A15A96E74FEF

2. https://www.amazon.com/Tipping-Point-Little-Things-Difference/dp/0316346624

3. Of course when there is a limit on education, use of modern technology, access to information, and travel, etc., your community has to mean everything because you often don’t have the basic tools to join any other.

4. See, for example, Michalski CA, Diemert LM, Helliwell JF, Goel V, Rosella LC. Relationship between sense of community belonging and self-rated health across life stages. SSM Popul Health. 2020 Oct 12;12:100676. doi: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2020.100676. PMID: 33134474; PMCID: PMC7585135.

5. They are not the only culprits. They are just the most effective miners.