Everyone's doing it

I have joined Facebook. Why have I joined Facebook? Mainly -- perhaps even solely -- in order to get a better sense of what's happening with a number of friends/ family members whom I rarely hear from. It seems most of them are on Facebook!

This is not really my kind of thing. Even writing this blog is often difficult for me, trying to walk the thin line between revealing enough about myself and my life to keep it from being boringly impersonal, and revealing an embarrassing too much; between my well-developed sense of privacy, and my desire to communicate my thoughts and feelings about "things."

Besides which Facebook is so much a matter of word bites -- "the family and i just got home from chunky-cheese, the line was out the door the whole time we were there," or (among the teenagers), "Mall tonight?" "What time?" -- whereas I am hard-pressed to limit what I say in these blog postings to just over a page. I have to work at being succinct.

Then there's the fact that, besides the minutiae of people's lives, I am constantly bombarded with political links from my most politically active "Friend" (my much-admired sister-in-law, Karen, whom I discussed at some length in the Oct. 27, 2010 Note )-- which leave me feeling overwhelmed, because many of them concern issues I do feel strongly about, but I simply cannot sign that many petitions (I don't much believe in petitions anyway, but rather in letters from individuals -- and I can't write that many letters to my President and my congressional reps!); with pleas to buy purses or have a purse-buying party, from the daughter of one of my Friends (whom I felt duty-bound to accept as a Friend as well) who sells the things; and with the announcements that so-and-so is now friends with so-and-so.

And I don't understand all the intricacies of the thing. What does the "Like" feature mean? So often people seem to "like" something that doesn't really call for a do-you-like-this-or-not opinion. And since I am getting all these exchanges between my Friends, and their Friends -- whom I don't generally ask to be friends with, since for heaven's sake I don't even know these people -- does that mean all of my exchanges are appearing on not only my Friends' pages (where I don't find them!), but on the pages of my Friends' Friends? It's all quite mad.

And my god, was ever an expression more overused than 'lol'?

Nonetheless, this very public "bulletin board" is doing exactly what I hoped it would do: letting me see what are the day-to-day concerns and activities of those I care about, but have a hard time keeping in touch with. I've already learned much more about my nephew in these few weeks of reading his and his friends endless one-line communiques, than I have ever known before. Didn't know he played the guitar ("I sing, too," he told me), didn't know he "tutted" (tutting being a dance form -- as I learned when I looked it up on the Internet -- in which the emphasis is on sliding the arms and hands in and out of geometric designs, a la King Tut [or to be more precise, like the figures in wall paintings in Egyptian tombs]), didn't know he liked the Beatles (one of the few things we have in common).

Well, so there I am, though I may very well be the weakest link in the chain.