Monday, November 14, 2011

When Tweeting Depletes: How Social Media Can Disconnect Us

The conversation continues courtesy of eJewishPhilanthropy (What? You still don;t subscribe? Shame!). Here I am, Mr. Digital Oleh, agreeing that digital is not the only solution. Maybe not even the best solution. Like a knife or a drill, it is a tool. We need to learn how to use it well and when to put it back in the virtual tool box and use other tools. Discuss...

When Tweeting Depletes:
How Social Media Can Disconnect Us
November 11, 2011

by Ami Hersh and Leor Shtull Leber

As people who barely remember a time before the Internet and who use Facebook (too) often to stay in touch with friends from around the world, we are not ignorant of the power of social media and technology in connecting people and ideas. However, we question the direction we are taking when we rely too heavily on technology and we fear the authenticity of our relationships when they are based on “@s” and “#s”

We admit we are guilty too. Once we were sitting around a table with friends, each of us on our own laptop. Somebody walked in and asked if he could join and do homework with us, and we awkwardly apologized that we were actually in a meeting – it just so happened that our meeting involved us all sitting in a circle in silence working collaboratively on the same Google doc.

Still, we use the word “guilty” because of the value of personal relationships with which we were raised. We both recently attended the JFNA General Assembly in Denver and were shocked to see the technology culture present and the (over)use of smartphones during sessions. We were encouraged to play with our phones instead of focusing on the speakers. People barely looked up – a great success according to the “Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!” message of the conference. What happened to turning off your phone for a lecture? Further, one of the winning innovative ideas at the Jewish Futures Conference called for the elimination of meetings: young people don’t want to waste their time meeting in person when smart phones can do the job.

Well, we are young people who have smart phones. We still cherish the face to face time of meetings in person – and look forward to disconnecting by turning off our phones during those meeting. Email and social media are important and effective tools, but we must be conscious of overuse and of replacing genuine in-person relationships, both when we are distant and even when we are together in the same room, by tweeting instead of talking.

As it says in Mishlei 27:19, “As water reflects face to face, so the heart of man to man.” The beauty of interpersonal relationships is the ability to look into the eyes of another human being and connect deeply with them through conversation and expression. As you stare into the eyes of another human being created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, you are able to let their souls reflect and interact with your own. The whole world can open up before your eyes. Social media is spectacular, important, and quite useful when utilized in its proper time and place. Let us not however allow the over-presence of social media to dilute our in-person enduring relationships.

Ami Hersh is a senior rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the assistant director of Camp Ramah in Nyack. He can be reached at Ami@campramah.org

Leor Shtull Leber is a senior at Brown University concentrating in Cognitive Science and a Student Representative on the Brown RISD Hillel Board of Trustees. She can be reached at leor.shtull.leber@gmail.com

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Connecting the Affiliated

My friend and colleague Arnie Samlan posted about a conversation he had with Beth Finger, who is working on a project called Jewish Without Walls. They suggest we "Forget about Jewish Affiliation, Think about Jewish Connectedness:"
"During our conversation this morning, we both challenged the relevance of "Jewish affiliation", which has been used in every Jewish demographic study as a measure of community success in modern America. The problem is, and has always been, that the operational definition of "affiliation" is often "pays dues to a synagogue". Even those who expand the definition someone, rarely get beyond handing money to an organization (JCC, Federation, Hillel) as the operational definition."
He explores several problems with using affiliation as a metric, including leaving our serious Jews who are "not religious," those for whom membership is of little if any value, and that it does not include significant numbers of Jews who relate to their Jewishness independently, including growing numbers who use social media to express their Jewishness.

He (with a nod to Beth Finger) suggests changing the metric to  "Jewish Connectedness." He would like Jewish sociologists to take into account the many ways of relating meaningfully to being Jewish. He wants to find a way to include serious Jewish paths that may not lead through a synagogue, federation or JCC. He includes summer camping and independent minyanim as well as those "who are doing Jewish in non-institutional spaces or in secular spaces, Jews connecting online in meaningful ways folks and who participate in Beth's Jewish Without Walls, in havurot and in other groupings that are not (yet) dues-based groups."

I think Arnie has the beginnings of an interesting framing of the conversation that we have all been having for a while. And while those who would overturn existing institutional frameworks might see this as invitation Occupy Organized Judaism, I see it as a refreshing way to begin talk about the apples and oranges in the same conversation. After all, Apple Jews and Orange Jews are still all Jews!

I would press the idea a bit further:

How can we in the synagogue world change the way we operate to increase the CI - Connectedness Index - for each member family and individual? While we in this world often do a lot to attract affiliation, we don't always (or even often) do a good enough job of connecting them to other adults in our congregations. We get them when they feel they need us (religious school, nursery school, Bar/Bat Mitzvah) but we don't always connect the adults in the family. So when the kids are ready to move on, the adults do as well.

Using the CI as a way to measure and improve what we do is as important as using it to find a meaningful category for non-Congregational connecting. I still like the word "affiliate" though. It makes me feel like we can use it to affirm that we obeying Hillel's dictum not to separate ourselves from the community.

Like Arnie, I am not the statistician to figure out how to count these things in the larger picture. I do know that in our synagogue and religious school, we have begun to focus on connecting parents. Our room parents now focus on getting parents together rather than doing the shopping or helping with the seder. (See article on page 6 Torah at the Center). I challenge you to share more ways of connecting the people who ARE affiliated! Because we need to raise the CI of all of our people!

Cross posted to Welcome to the Next Level

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