All a-Twitter
Posted by Danielle Bean in Family on Monday, October 06, 2008 10:00 AM
When I first started blogging a little over four years ago, few people even knew what a blog was.
These days, few people don’t know what a blog is. Big-name bloggers are interviewed as experts on national news networks and everyday moms exchange URLs at the playground.
For those who don’t read or write blogs, there’s Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, and good ole Google.
Online social networking and communication is awesome. It’s powerful. It’s fast, easy, entertaining, and incredibly convenient.
But does it cost us something?
Nicholas Carr, in his article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, makes the case that it surely does. When that article first was published this past summer, it made the rounds among many bloggers I know. All of us seemed to recognize a loss of some kind—and yet none of us were quite sure what to do about that loss once we recognized it.
A couple of weeks ago, Ryan Sayre Patrico of the First Things blog, among others, criticized a Colorado newspaper that had a reporter “Twitter” the funeral of a local 3-year-old girl. Patrico also shared that he had recently learned of the death of two of his friends through an announcement on Facebook.
Is this appropriate? In what ways might instant publishing and real-time public communication negatively affect the quality of our reading, writing, thinking, and human connections?
A little over a year ago, I was seriously flirting with the idea of quitting blogging altogether. I even had my “goodbye” post saved in Word, ready to publish.
“I find myself wanting more and more to focus on and preserve the privacy and sanctity of my own home and family—my own little domestic church,” I wrote to a friend at the time. “To decrease so that my family might increase. I feel like the blog splashes it all out there and puts an unnecessary focus on me-me-me.”
I was onto something there. I don’t want to wake up one morning to find myself doing the equivalent of Twittering a funeral, but neither do I want to shirk a duty to use my abilities and opportunities to give greater glory to God.
I have come to recognize that just like all the others, blogging is a flawed means of communication. And yet it’s one that I believe I am called to use.
The key, I think, is finding balance—between public and private, between myself and others, and between real life relationships and online ones.
Part of that balance comes from actively seeking the input of others. My decidedly un-bloggy husband, for example, keeps me grounded by editing when I ask him to and vetoing certain topics that he doesn’t want me to share about publicly. Fair enough.
I also find balance by focusing on real-life relationships first and foremost. Of course with my own family, but also with other moms in my area who may or may not know anything about what I do online.
And finally, but most importantly, whether we are bloggers or commenters, Facebookers or Twitterers, readers or writers, it is absolutely critical that one real-life relationship trumps all others—our relationship with Christ.
“Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”—1 Corinthians 10:31
Surely St. Paul meant to include blogging with the phrase “whatever you do,” don’t you think?
What are your thoughts? Do you think online communication threatens to destroy our brain cells and trivialize the importance of human relationships?
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