By Martha Martin
Minister of Education and Care
St. Andrew's United Church, Halifax

“Belonging” ­ The Social Network

I’m happy to offer the second sermon in our Wiki-Bible series. For those who weren’t hear last week, Russ introduced the 9 week series by explaining that what we hope to do is to examine “…some of the texts that people turn to when they seek spiritual meaning, or moral clarity, or deep healing. So, ‘Wiki-Bible’ is not so much a collection of texts as a cultural crossroads at which people find and share the stories that shape their lives – whether they appear in books, movies, plays, music, and so on.”

Our hope is that the discussion moves out past Sunday morning. The sermons will be on our website, along with a blog. That part of the website is now up and running, and we hope that many of you will enter the online discussion, and also make suggestions for the next 7 weeks in the series.

Today, I’m going to talk about the 2010 movie The Social Network, and hopefully help us reflect on some of the themes that I found in the movie. Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the movie – it’s not a prerequisite, and I’ll explain what you need to know. If you haven’t seen it, maybe you’ll be inspired to go out and rent it on DVD – it was just released this past week. It is on just about everyone’s “Top 10 movies of 2010 list”, and many rank it as the best movie of 2010.

It’s a great movie – visually fun to watch, with fast paced dialogue written by Aaron Sorkin, who was responsible for the TV series The West Wing.

In one review I read about this movie, the reviewer says: “The Social Network is to the 2000s what Casablanca was to the 1940s, Rebel Without a Cause was to the 1950s, and Wall Street was to the 1980s. It is a film that tells a specific story while defining the very context of the age in which it sits. … Just as Casablanca challenged viewers to choose a side in World War II and Wall Street opened our eyes to the excess of lavish 80s lifestyles and unchecked greed, The Social Network warns us about the incredible responsibility of being instantly globally connected – all the while re-discovering the real meaning of our relationships in life.”

The tagline for the movie is “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies”. The movie tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg, the young genius behind the website Facebook, and the people he, whether unwittingly or not, stepped on along the way to becoming the world’s youngest billionaire.

But let me just pause for a minute – I suspect there might be at least some of you who feel lost already … so let’s briefly take a step back … what is the social network? The social network is a way of communicating on the Internet where all users can be active participants in the conversations. It allows people to produce and share content directly with other users to share the information and resources they need. It allows and encourages open access for individuals to share thoughts, opinions, and feelings.

Just for fun, I’m going to show you a two minute clip that was circulating on youtube and Facebook at Christmastime – someone has imagined how the nativity story might be told through social media.

Show two minute clip, The Digital Nativity

I hope that gives you a bit of an idea of what social media is, and the social network. Did you see the range of elements – email messages, google maps, Wikipedia, twitter, youtube, sharing pictures and videos, online shopping, and, of course Facebook … all together, it’s a way of communicating, it’s a way of getting and sharing information … and, especially with Facebook, it’s a way of belonging.

Jean Vanier is the founder of the international movement of L’Arche communities, where people who have developmental disabilities create homes together with the friends who assist them. Born in 1928, he is the son of Governor General Georges Vanier and Pauline Vanier. Jean Vanier has become a leader in consciousness-raising about the plight of all who are marginalized, and is internationally recognized as a social and spiritual leader. He is the author of the best selling book Becoming Human, based on the 1998 Massey Lectures, and Finding Peace, written in 2003. MacLean’s Magazine has called him “a Canadian who inspires the world”. Today, there are more than 120 L’Arche communities on five continents.

When Canadian filmmaker Karen Pascal traveled to France to meet Jean Vanier, she planned to make a film about him, but he wanted to make a film about what he said is the most important issue facing humanity today in our post 9/11 world – belonging.

In the film, which comes with a discussion and study guide, we see Vanier point out the tension between human beings’ inherent need for an identity and a place to belong, and the extreme end of that continuum where that need to belong engenders exclusivity, and what I sometimes call “circling the wagons.” Vanier’s lifelong work has been about creating communities where everyone belongs, and where everyone is honoured and celebrated. The circle always has an opening. It is never closed.

As Vanier suggests, this need to belong isn’t new. It’s in our DNA. The methods of today might be new, but the need to belong has always been there. In the movie The Social Network, we are led to believe that the creation of Facebook was a response on Mark Zukerberg’s part to not being “punched” for Harvard’s “final clubs.” There is a suggestion in the film that the demise of his friendship with Eduardo, his best friend, and co-founder of Facebook, began when Eduardo did get asked to try out for one of the final clubs. Whether that’s true or not has been a subject for much debate.

Here’s a bit of background from Wikipedia, because I didn’t know all this - the historical basis for the name final club is that Harvard used to have a variety of clubs for students of different years being in different clubs, and the "final clubs" were so named because they were the last social club a person could join before graduation.

Each fall the clubs hold "punch season," which is similar to the rush period for fraternities. Sophomores and juniors are invited to a series of social events. After each event, more likely prospective members, or "punches", are invited back. After the last event, called a "final dinner", each club elects 10-30 new members who then choose among the clubs they have been asked to join. Being "punched" refers to receiving an invitation to the first punch event. As you might imagine, there has been much controversy and debate about this process and its exclusive nature over the years.

Here’s a clip from the movie where Mark is pitching his Facebook idea to Eduardo …

The Social Network clip – Outside

Did you hear what Mark Zukerberg said? “it’s taking the whole social experience of college and putting it online”, and then Eduardo says “it would be exclusive”; then Mark says “people would have to know the people on the site to get past your own page – it’s like getting punched, it’s like a final club with a president.”

As I said earlier, whether or not there is a lot of truth, or some truth, or no truth in the movie has been a subject of much debate this past year. Zuckerberg has denied much of the narrative of the movie, but the fact is is that there were settlements of substantial amounts of money from Zuckerberg to both Eduardo, who was eventually frozen out of the company, and the two other young Harvard men who claimed that Zuckerberg stole their idea for Facebook.

For me, I think the movie raises questions of the quality of our relationships – it’s possible to have hundreds, if not thousands of “friends” on Facebook. It may be a wonderful tool, but are we still able to practice compassion, concern, and inclusivity in that environment?

Our gospel lesson today recalls the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. In John’s gospel, we hear about Jesus’ baptism from John the Baptist’s perspective, looking back. He says “I didn’t know who he was … I was there and saw the Spirit come down on him like a dove from heaven. And the Spirit stayed on him.” Then we hear that the next day, John saw Jesus again and said to his own followers “There he is again …” after which John’s followers began to follow Jesus. Jesus asks them “what do you want?”, or some translations say “what are you looking for? …” and the disciples reply “Teacher, where do you live?”, which I think is a kind of funny first question to ask someone when you are just meeting them.

To which Jesus replies “Come and see.” Come and see. What a wonderful answer - or, really, a non-answer. Perhaps this is the equivalent of the Facebook “friend request.” On Facebook, you can only get access to another person’s story and information after they ask you to be their friend. That’s the way Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin designed it, and it still holds. It’s exclusive that way. And when you press that “confirm request” button, are you really saying “come and see?” It can either turn out to be a superficial relationship, or it might be the beginning of something deeper.

I wonder if it is that much different in our gospel story. John introduced his disciples to Jesus. Andrew in turn introduced his brother Peter to Jesus. And then the disciples spoke to others, and they told others … and then Paul travelled the Mediterranean world and introduced countless others to the Jesus movement … and in several hundred years there was a worldwide movement. Same process, just took a little longer than Facebook.

Those of us who know the story of Jesus know that Andrew and Peter, and many other followers, began a journey that would change their lives, and the life of the world. But the first invitation was the friend request, “Come and see.” If you read the gospel story in one fail swoop, from beginning to end, you find that despite their best intentions, those poor disciples never got it right.

The disciples thought that they were being invited into an elite club, with Jesus as its president. The club of the Kingdom of God. But whenever they thought they had it all figured out, whenever they began to close the circle of their community, Jesus did something surprising – he ate dinner with someone who he wasn’t supposed to, he healed someone he wasn’t supposed to, he welcomed women and children into the mix, he welcomed people into the community that he wasn’t supposed to … like Jean Vanier two thousand years later, he challenged the people of his day to create communities where everyone belonged and where everyone was honoured and celebrated.

Now, I’m not saying that can’t happen on Facebook. I love Facebook – I’m on every day … I learn a lot, about my friends, and about the world. It allows me to keep up with people that I sometimes only see once a year, if that. I have reconnected with cousins on the other side of the country that I have spoken to in years. But Facebook doesn’t replace this face to face community. It doesn’t replace the 15-20 university students that gather every Tuesday evening in the Mary Holmes room for dinner, or the folks that come in right after them for the First Light study … or the many groups that meet in this building every week. It’s not either/or … it’s both/and. Thanks be to God.

http://www.standrewshfx.ca/blog/
Paul Jarzembowski, Spiritual Popcorn; http://spiritualpopcorn.glogspot.com/20010/10social-network.html
Living the Faith, The Journal, p.47; The United Church of Canada, 2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkHNNPM7pJA
belonging, the Search for Acceptance; study guide, p.2-3
Wikipedia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtxyfQtZlKQ