The Facebook Dilemma
Posted by Rachel Balducci in Family on Monday, September 20, 2010 10:05 PM
I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. On the one hand, I love being connected with so many people, seeing all kinds of photographs, reading snippets here and there about a wide variety of random tidbits of information that has zero impact on my productivity.
On the other hand, see above.
Facebook is a vortex that sucks me in, and whenever I do have to enter the gates I brace myself. It can often be a bumpy ride. Too many times I have logged in only to blink and realize I’ve been on for three days. (Hopefully that’s not really true. But it feels that way.)
A dear friend of mine recently closed out her Facebook account citing pure exhaustion. She said it was the best thing she’d done for herself in years. My friend is dealing with fertility issues and it started to feel like everytime she read the happy news of another acquaintance being pregnant, it just got to be too much. She really was happy for all these people, but after a while she decided she just didn’t need to put herself in the way of so many happy announcements, not right now. Not so many gut punches, please.
There are positive sides to these social networks. Elizabeth Foss touched on this in a recent podcast, how Facebook is actually bringing her family closer together in a season where they are apart. I think that’s wonderful and shows the positive aspects of using media to our advantage, making it work for us instead of the reverse.
But I totally get how it has its downsides. I find myself getting overwhelmed by all the information, the clicking here which leads to clicking there and somehow I’m at a page 43 times removed from where I started. There’s also that whole aspect of winding up on people’s Facebook without meaning to. I closed my account last year because I was at a party where I found myself singing a bunch of karaoke. At the end of the night I was asking people to please not post any pictures on Facebook and that’s when I realized I was starting to get a little paranoid, I think? I have since reopened my account, but I hardly ever check in. There just aren’t enough hours in my day.
Ultimately I guess it depends on the day. Somedays: LIKE. Somedays: Not so much.
Print Blog
Email a FriendPost a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Faith And Family Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
