I will start this by saying that I love Facebook. I will admit it! I love that I know what's going on with far flung friends and family. For instance, I know who is having a rough time with their preschooler, I know who is almost due with their baby, I know who took trips and who stayed home for the holidays. I get to watch friends babies grow into children and I get to see photos from weddings I was unable to attend (or perhaps not invited to). In turn, I can keep all those people up to date with my life and my girls lives.
Having grown up mainly on the East Coast before returning to CA, I have a large group of friends and family across the country. I love the ease with which I can stay in touch on a pretty daily basis with them.
However, I am starting to realize that FB has a dark side. People forget that their statements are directed at real people sometimes and feelings get hurt. Take my recent post about taking down decorations. An extended family member then told me that my [dead] grandfather would be disappointed in me for not leaving them up to celebrate Orthadox Christmas. I'm sorry, what?! This was not a family member I am close with and she obviously didn't know my grandfather well if she thought that. The thread just kept going- she couldn't be convinced that he wouldn't care. Then other family members chimed in, some to also criticized which honestly surprised and hurt me. I definitely had support, but I think most people just didn't want to get involved. I had a lot of emails and calls about it though.
This incident hasn't left me feeling like I won't still be active on FB, but it did take me a few days to post again. I think that people need to be more mindful of how public comments can be. And I don't mean public in the sense of some random person getting information about you, I mean about all your friends friends who can read a comment you make on their status. Some things are just completely inappropriate on FB and I deem conjuring a dead grandfather as one of them.
Yup! That's what lots of people feel they don't know what's going on with me - I tend to get really paranoid about what's on fb...and the last thing you want to have happen is a weird antagonistic argument where people can chime in their likes and dislikes over something you wish would either go away or never have happened in the first place. I saw that fb exchange and immediately thought it was an inappropriate comment (regardless of the merit of the argument) - it just didn't belong there. sorry that happened, but you were definitely supported -I just didn't want to make it worse by supporting you publicly on fb and continuing the thread :-)
ReplyDeleteA lot of people don't realize (or think about) the fact that everyone on my friends list doesn't know everyone else. Innocent status updates turn into heated discussions where we, the original posters, are in the bad position of having to defend certain friends to people who don't even know them, and who would never otherwise meet in real life. It sucks. It's happened to me a couple times and it makes me want to just delete the original post and all the comments, and hope that my friends and family are mature enough not to get mad at me for that.
ReplyDeleteVery true, I intended to touch on that. My FB friends are a wide variety of people with differing political views, different faiths, different parenting styles, etc. I see lots of stuff that I don't agree with, but I never attempt to "set them straight". I think that a lot of people forget there isn't one way to do things. I feel like I only learned that in the last few years. Just because you don't agree with something doesn't make it wrong. I have firm beliefs about a lot of things but I can still be friends with people who disagree.
ReplyDeleteThat whole exchange made me very happy that my parents aren't on facebook! Ha! But, seriously, stuff like that has made me change the privacy settings for some of the people on my friends list. Not everyone needs to see the status updates.
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