Grigg's Law

Several of my pastor friends are on Facebook and Twitter.  Some of them use the tools well, some, not so much.  In fact, some of them even use them to reinforce the stereotypes that dominate how the 'unchurched' think about them.  You know the archytypes:  the sanctimonious stalwart shouting in stentorian tones, the too-nice milquetoast, or the rabbinical obscurantist lost in his dusty tomes.  Of course the 400 character maximum really cramps the style of guys used to banging on for 40 minutes or more.

Preachers preaching (or salesmen selling or politicians politicking) in FB always surprises me because it seems so terribly counterproductive.  Social media are social tools to help us authentically know and enjoy each other more, not a personal advertising medium.

So I would like to offer a modest proposition to those in knowledge businesses:  Social media like Facebook and Twitter aren't and should not be simply extensions of what you do and say in your 'day job'.  Aside from being a heckuva lot of fun, the value of social media is that it enables you to share aspects of your life and personality that are hard to show to people with whom you seldom interact with in person.  We use stereotypes because like nature, our brains abhor a vacuum:  for those we don't know very well, we fall back on what we know of 'people like them' as a mechanism for filling in the empty spaces.  The only way any of us ever get past our stereotyping of a person is if we can replace the cliches manufactured by our minds with the concrete reality of a lived life.

And that's (if I can be so crass as to say so) the "business proposition" of Facebook:  help people know who you are in the belief that by knowing the real you they will be able to differentiate you from all of the other people who are lumped into your stereotypical archetype.  For it is only through the authentic evaluation of you as a real human being that trust can be created.

So long as you remain merely a symbol to me, I must necessarily believe that your relationship with me can only be stereotypical.  Become known to me and me to you, indeed become my friend and then we together can create a new reality that can transcend our prejudices, stereotypes and ignorance.

I call this "Griggs Law" after my friend Robbie Griggs who taught it to me.  In official propositional form it goes something like this:  The success of social media relationship building is inversely proportional to the effort expended to achieve non-relational goals".  Or mathematically, (sorta kinda):  e^-1$=e(Ϝβ+Ϯ) where e is effort, $ is non-relational goals, Ϝβ is Facebook and Ϯ is Twitter.  I'm going to stop now.