Project Vision 21

"Facebook is back!" wrote a female "pastor" (quotes used to indicate sarcasm) last Monday, October 4, after that well-known social network stopped operating for several hours. But the message continued with this statement: “Christ did the miracle! God heard us!"

I must say that I am totally in favor of asking the divinity to intervene in those situations in which it seems that there is no other solution than precisely the direct intervention of the divinity, that is, a miracle. But can Facebook's returning to normal operations be considered a miracle?

Also, if God can perform the miracle of reactivating Facebook, does that mean that Facebook enjoys a privileged position in God's eyes and that if another social network goes down then there will be no divine intervention?

In other words, is Christ so concerned to see Facebook operating normally that he even works a miracle for that to happen, perhaps fearing that without Facebook there is no other effective way to proclaim the message of salvation?

Be that as it may, I must confess that the overlapping of "Facebook" with "God heard us!" is (in the best of cases) problematic for me because it reveals the extent to which social networks have become a kind of virtual cave that, keeping us locked inside, now appears as if it were the totality of our reality.

Paraphrasing Wittgenstein (and asking him to forgive us), the message of the aforementioned "pastor" seems to express that "the limits of my Facebook are the limits of my world." And although it is reckless to appropriate Wittgenstein's words, I consider that this comparison between "social networks" and "my world" is a reality for many people.

In addition, extending to social networks what Byung-Chul Han says about smartphones, it could be said that social networks, far from being a communication technology, are a control mechanism, with virtual chains that fulfill the same functions as the real chains mentioned by Plato in his Allegory of the Cave.

Be that as it may, when someone considers an outage of Facebook services so dramatic that divine intervention should be implored and when someone celebrates the restoration of Facebook services as a divine miracle, an existential line has been crossed and something (or a lot) has been lost of the sense of transcendence. 

But it is not only what the "pastor" said, because many of her followers added numerous comments supporting and reaffirming that God intervened in favor of Facebook. Of course, no one asked for a similar divine intervention to end wars, poverty, disease, or discrimination.

We live in such a strange time that if Facebook suddenly “falls”, people immediately pray for God to intervene, but if someone “falls” due to the blows of life, God is no longer needed, and that person (hungry, helpless) must solve his/her problems on their own.

We need real miracles in our lives, whether Facebook works or not. Perhaps expanding our minds, hearts, and courage to act will indeed take a divine miracle.