Though I have a Facebook account and I enjoy keeping connections with my relatives and friends in Ohio, I rarely log into my account. Part of the reason is that I don’t have it on my phone, so it means I have to sit down at the computer and log in. A bigger part of the reason, though, is that I often have observed plenty of posts that attempt to persuade me and other readers to a particular point of view on politics, religion, and other current controversial issues. In the earlier days of my Facebook account, I sometimes posted smart quips (at least, I thought they sounded smart), but they may have been interpreted as more snarkey than helpful. And I’m sure I didn’t change anybody’s mind about anything that mattered.
One of my side jobs is teaching a college-level Interpretation of Fiction class online, and at the beginning of the course, we read Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” which is a powerful illustration of how people change their minds. The narrator of the story is racist and ableist until he spends an evening with a blind man named Robert who is a friend of the narrator’s wife. By getting to know someone who was blind and working together on drawing a cathedral, the narrator changes his mind about blind people (or at least Robert). What I find interesting is that the narrator didn’t change his mind because he read an article or a Facebook post about people with disabilities. He changed his mind because he had a personal interaction with someone who was different than him. Through spending an evening together, the narrator and Robert created a relationship.
Relationships create the connections needed to expand our worldview, and without those relationships, language is limited in its impact. Based on what I’ve learned from reading and teaching “Cathedral,” I see that Facebook is a wonderful medium to share news about family, post cute pet photos, and maintain connections with friends far away, but it falls short of changing anybody’s mind about anything that’s meaningful. I’m not sure it was really ever intended to.
Photo courtesy of Kuhlens Photography