Positive Liberty

I’ve joined Facebook. I’m not a joiner, but there you have it.

Cato University introduced me to some very interesting people with whom I’d like to stay in touch even despite the distance between us. This has meant taking some recent pictures, selecting a nice quote or two, and writing those little blurbs on what my interests are (still working on that one). I have also come to appreciate the great value of having an eccentric name, and I now hope to name my children in a social-networking-software-appropriate (yet not entirely ridiculous) manner.

It’s a little frightening to realize how common Facebook is among people just a little bit younger than I am. Consider Roger Bacon High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, which happens to be my alma mater. The class of 2007 has 113 Facebook members. My own class — 1994 — has five. 1990 has zero. There’s a steady trendline between them. Kids fret nowadays about having too few Facebook friends, and apparently “too few” may mean in the low triple digits.

(Me, I don’t care about quantity. I care about certain individuals I don’t intend to lose touch with, and these people are relatively few. Even before Facebook, I already knew I was never invited to the cool kids’ parties in high school. The only difference is that if we’d had Facebook back then, the cool kids wouldn’t have had to inform me about it in person. Which would have spared all of us some trouble.)

Civil society is moving to the Internet, as everyone knows. How, and where, and why, and what it’s doing to us — these remain only partly answered questions. It’s most puzzling to me, though, that you have to be of a certain age before you would even think to ask them.

One group of worriers fears that civil society is actually disappearing. They fail to notice both the prevalence of online communities and the importance that many people attach to them. I am fairly confident, for instance, that I could get into my brother-in-law’s gaming guild if I wanted, and that, based on this contact, I could probably even set up a real-world meeting with some of them if I ever had any cause to. I am entirely confident that my brother-in-law could get an invite into my guild (I’ve got rank there), and that he would be viewed favorably by these people, even in real life, based on my online recommendation.

Our chosen groups actually account for a good deal of our social lives: We celebrate with these people. We mourn with them. We have fun with them. We have never seen one another in real life. And it doesn’t matter.

(I feel even more confident that the members of this blog community, most of whom have never met, have a similar social bond. Some of them I know absolutely nothing about — yet I recognize them as kindred spirits or at least as worthy adversaries.)

Another group of worriers is convinced that online communities are shallow, or trivial, or just plain silly. These fail to appreciate the vibrancy of online communities, their versatility, and the wide range of choices that are out there. It’s emphatically not just online gaming. As my theremin bleg below suggests, there are communities for nearly every interest. In a sense, civil society has never been healthier: Where in the real world could you ever have found a theremin club? And yet here it is.

George Will — usually a fine writer — only makes himself look clueless when he complains about the vanity and the shallowness of the Internet. Doesn’t he understand where all this apparent vanity comes from? Even while we’re creating something new, we’re also mocking the traditional press, which is and always has been absurdly pompous. The less you appreciate that mockery, the more we find it amusing. Yes, there are insufferable fools on the Internet. There are also reasonable people. The same goes, in both regards, for online communities. And for the administrators who run them.

Kinda like… I dunno… real life?

There is also a third group of worriers, and these are the ones that make me worry. “The Internet is just plain chaos,” they say. “This is just proof that we need more government!”

People who worry that the Internet is eroding civil society aren’t likely to see through this argument, because they don’t generally know enough about online communities to give good counterexamples. People who see online communities as silly or trivial aren’t apt to care about the supposed chaos in the first place. People who’ve grown up with online communities — and I am just barely among the first of them — mostly wonder what all the fuss is about.

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