21st Century Communion

A friend from college, V Kingsley, died on April 1st after a six-year, horrific and awe-inspiring battle against cancer.  Most people would have succumbed long before, but V was never one to go gentle into that good night, which will come as no surprise to anyone who met her for even five minutes.  The memorial service was yesterday up in Santa Cruz, and I couldn't attend--but the service was streamed live over the web, so I was able to participate in a little bit of the experience.  A few words about that in a minute--but first, a quick story about V.

We never particularly hung out--but as a frequent Tech Director on shows I was acting in, we worked together often.  And I quickly learned a respect for her that made her more memorable than a lot of the people I did hang out with.  We had a Sociology class together, and it should have been a great class because it's a great subject--but the teacher was bad.  Really remarkably bad.  Never taught anything that wasn't in the book, and his lectures always always always expounded on the obvious with a slowness so extreme it bordered on the surreal.  "Max Weber's... conflict theory... stated... that people... are... in... conflict."  (Truly, you cannot imagine how long it would take him to get those words out.)  It was so bad that the rest of us quietly gathered into groups of four so that only one at a time would have to actually attend the class and take notes.  And when we were there, we just sat and felt our brains dying.  But V, she was different.  She would stand up and say to this bad, bad teacher, "What the hell are you talking about?"

Which would invariably leave him confused--and me immensely grateful.  (His usual response, when thus challenged, was to repeat exactly what he had just said.  Slower.)  V eventually transferred out of the class to something that wouldn't waste her time, which was a very great sadness because now it was just us sheep and that very bad shepherd.

Graduation happened, we all went our various ways, and I never saw V again.  But with Facebook, I was able to reconnect with her a little, to say nice things to her that I'm now very glad I said.  She responded with typical warmth and grace.  I read a few of the entries in her excellent blog and my mind reeled.  Blindness.  Pain beyond imagining.  But she kept soldiering on through it all, with her sense of humor intact.  And then on April 1st she finally succumbed, leaving behind her partner Dani and her son Parker and a huge number of devoted friends and family.

The service, as I mentioned, was streamed live.  There were severe technical problems, but let me just say up front that even a poor experience beats the heck out of no experience at all.  I'm glad I was able to kinda sorta be there as people said goodbye to V.  But the online experience also led to some thinking about what community is becoming in These Times of Ours, and there are few things more likely to make me start setting words down.

The church (unitarian universalist, the most enlightened of the Christian churches) had set up a single camera hanging from the ceiling.  It was locked down, never moving, never zooming, the image was static and distant and distinctly low-res, particularly after being compressed for live streaming.  The sound was just as distant, with echo and reflection and distortion that made it very hard to hear anything that was being said--while the songs were almost robbed of anything resembling musicality.  I had the stream on for about an hour, and soon realized that the fact that I was up and making a sandwich during the service really didn't say much for the quality of the internet stream.

But was it purely a technical problem?  If the tech had been as good as it was for, say, the recent royal wedding, with high-def closeups and multiple expensive microphones capturing every nuance of sound, while commentators babbled on in the background with context and opinions, then maybe I'd have felt a greater sense of communion with the others assembled for the service.  But is there an essential limitation inherent in the nature of the service itself?  In other words: is it really possible to have a shared, communal experience without actually being there?

Bear in mind that without Facebook I'd have never been able to reconnect with V in the first place, so clearly the social media have their place.  But a memorial is a very particular kind of experience.  From my grandmother's service, I still have a vivid memory of when the bells began to peal, summoning people to a place where such services had been held since, in that case, the 11th century.  As soon as the sound of those bells began, I suddenly felt the presence of everyone who had gone before in that place: the people who had been baptised there, the people who had married there, the people memorialized, the people who rested in the cemetery just outside.  There is an argument to be made, even by those of us who aren't particularly religious, for the notion of a patch of land made sacred by its use for exactly these sorts of ceremonies over time--and obviously none of that can be transmitted over the internet.

And while there were certainly moments in V's service that resonated--such as her former partner talking about how she had not been strong enough to continue supporting V throughout her long illness, even though she never stopped loving her--there was never anything that could compare with the impact of sitting in a room together as lives intersected and resonated.  In a different (but comparable) direction, I remember going to see the movie Dead Man Walking, and at the moment when Sean Penn's character is revealed strapped to the execution table, someone in the audience, for just a moment before she choked it off, let out a single anguished sob.  Perhaps she had a loved one who had been executed; perhaps she had a loved one who had been murdered; I can never know.  But the story in the movie had just set off bells in her and for a moment, she could not help but resonate with them.  If I'd watched the movie at home, the movie would still have had power, but not that kind of power.

Communion--here in its broadest definition as "an act or instance of sharing" or, even better, "intimate fellowship or rapport"--requires community.  I am, as I said before, glad to have been able to share the experience at all, but technology is still no substitute for a gathering of souls in a place sanctified by prior gatherings of souls, be it a church or even a movie theater or a baseball field.  I have a long and somewhat odd history of writing and delivering very well-received eulogies at such services, but there was a moment yesterday when the experience of watching other people's eulogies over the internet came to feel so unnatural that I (momentarily) resolved to never deliver another one in my life--but the fault there was not with the thing itself, but with the manner in which it was received.  The next time I seek a gathering of souls, I shall deliver my own soul unto the appropriate place at the appropriate time, and be with everyone else.

It looks like it was a great service.  I wish I could've been there.

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As a person of a certain age, the whole "social networking" thing, i.e. using the isolation of a computer to connect with other equally isolated people, seemed just a bit off. Over the years, though, various attempts have been made, some more successful than others, and I've slowly found myself drawn into these little devils. In no particular order, here are some of the places where I can be found:

MySpace - Probably the paradigm of the social networking space, and I can be found here in a few places--both as myself, and as someone named "Incorporation for Artists," plus of course "Zen Noir" can be found here as well. Not to mention Sergei from "Outta Sync," a character I played in a movie. (Distressingly, Sergei has more friends than I do!) The thing that bugs me about MySpace, though, is how busy it is. Sure it's nice that you can skin the appearance of your profile page, but those skins can get so involved--not to mention all the YouTube videos and music tracks that autoload and all the rest of it--that the page takes forever to load. My own sister's page has so much stuff on it that it (a) loads verrrry slowly, and (b) scrolls even morrrrre slowly, so that I almost never go there anymore because it's just too annoying.

Facebook - I resisted Facebook for ages because I'd already been on MySpace for about two years and couldn't for the life of me see any reason to be on two sites that accomplish nearly identical things. But a couple months ago I relented, and was rewarded with a fantastic immediate dividend: a great friend of mine from high school, Shannon Chamberlain (nee Walker), happened to search for my name just a few days after I signed onto Facebook. We reconnected after way too long, and as it happened I was about to go for a visit to Miami, so we were able to get together almost immediately. And, of course, it was one of those things where the years fell away and we almost instantly dropped into the same old delightful groove. This immediately made me into a huge Facebook fan. Since then I've found a bunch of people from college as well, and it just seems to work better for finding and connecting with people. Plus, the profile pages aren't skinnable, so the pages load much faster (my sister's page pops right up). On the other hand, those thousands of mini-apps can get seriously overwhelming--I'm constantly being sent "flairs" (little virtual buttons with pithy little aphorisms), or internet hugs or karma, or being invited to become someone's virtual feudal vassal, or being invited to take a quiz to find out which Shakespeare play I am. I drew the line at a vampire game where a friend of mine virtually bit me. Sorry, vamps are right out. Me no likee vampires. They scary.

Twitter - Okay, this one I just don't get. It's like microblogging, where there's a fixed limit to how many characters you can type at any given time. I think it should be obvious to anyone who reads any of my blog entries--I am just not that sort of writer. I like to luxuriate in language, to set the words rolling and see where they go. (Marc Rosenbush, on the other hand, is a minimalist--this is why he and I are good collaborators when we write together, because our approaches to writing are perfectly complementary--and he gets the Twitter paradigm immediately.) But more importantly, almost no one I know Twitters at all, so there's next to nothing to draw me there on any sort of consistent basis. I've written a grand total of three entries since joining, always without any enthusiasm. The sort of self-involved navel-gazing that Twitter seems to promote just doesn't fit my personality--the only person on earth I can think of who might care to know what I've been doing twenty times a day is my mom. But she isn't on Twitter either, so why?

Flickr - Then there are the sites that focus on social networking built around one particular activity. Flickr, for instance, is about photographs. From time to time I take pictures off the computer and put them on Flickr. Sometimes I put them there in order to post them here, but it's also nice to invite family members so that they can check out pictures as well. Nothing spectacular, but I understand what it does and why, and it's simple to use.

Goodreads - This one is all about books, so naturally it's a little closer to my heart. The site is labor-intensive--you have to enter each book you own one by one, and in my case that's a boatload of books. I've only entered a little over a hundred, which make up just three shelves of one bookcase--and I've got eight bookcases. (Not to mention the books that are literally piled across the top shelves of my kitchen cabinets.) But the idea is that you enter your books, record when you read them and maybe write little reviews, your friends do the same, and that way you can all share stuff you liked or disliked. (For example, when my friend Melissa Klein was about to read Thomas Cahill's "Gifts of the Jews," I was able to tell her why that had been my least favorite of the Cahill books, then once she too had read it she told me why she agreed with my assessment.) For a book lover, the appeal is obvious--for someone who isn't, this one may seem like a waste of time. Fair enough.

Last.fm - Like Goodreads, except for music. The great thing is that this site isn't labor-intensive at all: I downloaded a little application that simply watches the songs I play and records them on the site. So I get stats about which artists I play most often, plus there's a handy internet radio station component--if I'm traveling and don't have my iPod, I can log onto Last.fm and play a station that already knows the kinds of music I like. (It's actually quite good about picking songs I legitimately enjoy.) Very cool.

Okay, that's it, I'm tired now and am going to go do something else. Like sleep, maybe. For which there are no social networking sites at all, and let's all be grateful for that.