Just over a year ago, when I posted on neighborliness and my hopes for being rooted in a place, Rob and I didn't know how soon we'd be moving back to Three Rivers. In fact, it was exactly five months later that we moved out of our house in Grand Rapids and then another two months before we spent our first night in our apartment above World Fare. Over the past school year, we've commuted back and forth for work in Grand Rapids, but next week will mark the first time we'll be able to live in our new home full time--until next school year, anyway.
This morning, I spent some time composing a reply to a comment on another post on this infrequently tended blog, which caused me to reflect again on the notion of neighborliness, particularly in the context of virtual vs. face-to-face relationships. I find myself less and less willing to get worked up debating abstract ideas, especially online, and more inclined to spend my energy on the complications of face-to-face relationships in a place. Ideologies and dogmas inevitably break down when we attempt to know each other and ourselves fully in all of our inconsistencies. And ideally, when we're working side by side toward a common goal or eating and laughing together around a table, our differences become qualities that decorate our unique selves, rather than walls that cut us off from each other. We may still passionately disagree, but we can do so in the context of that time we showed up at the city commission meeting to represent the same side of a local issue or that time we sat on the park bench together, swapping stories about our junior high experiences while our kids played together on the playground.
I don't want to dismiss the ways in which internet technology can contribute to deep and complicated knowing of other individuals and communities, but I'm skeptical about that knowing being the rule, not just an exception. As I and the technology grow older together, these issues become muddier, not clearer for me. I'm the editor of an online magazine. I contribute to several blogs and other virtual publications. But I also help run a non-profit store in downtown Three Rivers, and I turned compost on Saturday outside a 27,000 square foot building that my husband and I are hoping to make something of for the benefit of the neighborhood. Bricks and mortar, flesh and blood collide in my life daily with megabytes and megapixels, cyberspace and server space.
What is the common thread running through it all--or are these really two different worlds with different ethics?
Are the virtual versions of ourselves inevitably going to be incomplete caricatures?
To what degree should people's variously (un)generous readings of our virtual selves constrain what we post online for all to judge?
By way of example: by posting my concerns and questions here, I may be projecting to un-careful or unknown readers a singular opinion for both myself and my husband, but we would answer (and even ask) these questions quite differently at this point in time. If we were to commence a heated debate via the comments, what would people assume about our marriage? Would those assumptions be true? Would a public record of our disagreement have positive value in the virtual public square or would it have negative value in terms of distraction, abstraction and confusion?
And what in the world does neighborliness have to do with all this?
