Facebook

Like many of my peers, I have a love-hate relationship with facebook. There is not much about myself I want the entire world to know. I post on facebook infrequently, limiting the content of my posts to psa's about political issues that I feel strongly about or links to media that I find very very amusing. However, despite the fact that I am so reserved in my contributions to facebook, I love to read about what others are up to. There are some serious pros and cons to this. Lately, I have been horrified by some of what I have read on facebook. People I know have posted scathing critiques of other people without (it seems to me) much attention to the fact that facebook is a public forum. This sort of public gossip makes me extremely uncomfortable. On the other hand, facebook is a wonderful place to find out about friends' significant lifecycle events quickly. Last year, my partner and I were travelling in Marshall, MN with a group of teens when a friend of ours had a baby. We were able to see photographs of her beautiful daughter, just hours after she was born, even though we were hours away.

Speaking of teens, facebook is also a remarkably effective tool for communicating with adolescents. In my former job, I ran the teen department of a small non-profit. When I was having getting my teens to respond to phone calls, emails and flyers, I established a facebook identity for myself at work. This allowed me to see what my teens were up to (both good and bad) and to get the word out quickly about events and anything else I wanted them to know about. It was amazing how quickly they responded to something on facebook that they would have ignored if it had come to them via email!