Facebook

Luddites.

You destroyers of knitting frames and cotton gins!

All ye who lament Facebook as taking the place of real intimacy and communication among real humans, I'm telling you now, you are luddites.

You are the same guys who expressed the same lament about the telegraph and the telephone.

I love social media.  (Although, I don't quite get Twitter yet, and probably never will.)

It's become fashionable, almost, to assert with very little argument that Facebook has destroyed real intimacy and community. And that's just false.

We were already atomized. We already lived far away from friends and family. We already barely participated in community. Facebook has brought us back together. 

Because of Facebook, I have reconnected with friends from childhood who were long lost to me and lived only in my memories.

I have found my favorite high school teacher.

I get to see my college friends' kids grow. 

I get to share my own child's goofy milestones like First Cake Pop.

I have access to the kind advice of many friends from many stages of my life when I wonder about potty training or sleep training. 

I am privileged to delight in my friends' successes and triumphs. 

I can mourn with them in real time too. 

I get to see my nieces and nephews, who all live 100s of miles away, grow up in the pictures their parents post on Facebook. 

Sure, it's not the same as being there, but the physical distance was still there in 2008, pre-Facebook for me.  Now, I can participate, at least virtually.

Facebook hasn't disconnected me from the world. It has reconnected me to many different worlds I've lived in over these 43 years and, in so doing, helped me create a new one in which my past and my present mix and mingle in interesting, surprising, and mostly satisfying ways.

Because, let's face it, many of the people on your Facebook feed are not people you would take the time to write letters to back in the good ol' days. And that's because, back in the good ol' days, a lot of them would have lived, worked and died right down the street from you. We don't live that way anymore, for better and for worse.  Now, we're a virtual village in the County of Zuckerbergia. 

So maybe you're thinking, but what about the town you live in, why don't you participate there instead of your online hamlet?  Well, first, I do. But second, the kind of world we live and work in is one in which people do not work down the street from home. So frequenting the local shops and meeting the neighbors has to happen after or before work and on the weekends. Times when all of us are busy with the business of our lives (like laundry and grocery shopping and laying around on the sofa watching America's Test Kitchen at nap time).

But there, my friends, Facebook steps in to lend a hand, too.

Example:  one night I pined for cake in my Facebook status, after my son had gone to bed. Within minutes, my across-the-street neighbor was on my doorstep, a giant slab of chocolate cake in hand. Sure, it may be trivial, cake (but cake is never trivial), but maybe you get my point. Facebook, for me, facilitates community, near and far. 

I can see a different side of it -- a side where you dive into an electronic world and never emerge from your room.  But most people aren't like that. Most people live in the world and use Facebook to stay in touch with various parts of it. 

So for all it's ills (and the occasional over-sharing that goes on), I'm happy it exists.  Life's richer because I got to see that cute picture of your kid with ice cream all over his face. Keep posting!