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| photo by Greg Halvorsen Schreck |
It happened again last week. A friend and I were sitting in my car, parked in her driveway, chatting late into the night. It had been too long since we’d been together and we were catching up on everything from her new job to my recent oral surgery to recent parenting fails and times when our kids have floored us with their wit or affection. (We both are in love with the other’s children and have an understanding that all bragging, gushing and venting is admissible within the confines of our friendship.) This friend, then, admitted that she had been traveling through a difficult time. Things were better now, but she’d not told me before because she’s a private person and, after all, she said she could tell from reading my Facebook updates the past few weeks and looking at the items on my “wall” that I was in a very different place: happy, organized, free.
This has happened before: someone I know makes a comment about my life, as seen via the items on my Facebook wall, and then says something self-deprecating such as, “Sometimes my work can be so tedious – I mean, not like yours. Yours always seems so satisfying and fun.” And then I have to explain…I’m Facebook “friends” with everyone from my favorite college professors (shout out to you Drs. Hein and Fletcher) to my mother-in-law, to the editors who are tapping their fingernails on their desks waiting for me to submit my work, to my priests, to people whom I’ve interviewed over the years and found particularly charming.
What I write on my page is always completely true (first rule of social networking = be honest), but is it the entirety of what I’m doing or feeling in a given day? Is it all that I’d tell my best friend over a glass of Shiraz at my kitchen counter? Or what I’d reveal to my husband before falling off to sleep? No. It’s not even close. I think of my Facebook page and “wall” as a very public place (because, you know, it is). For me, it’s more like a place to chat the way I’d speak to new acquaintances at a wedding reception. Or other parents on the playground after school. Or how I’d talk to my husband’s colleagues at a cocktail party. (In fact some of my “friends” are his colleagues.) And I enjoy it.
What I write on my page is always completely true (first rule of social networking = be honest), but is it the entirety of what I’m doing or feeling in a given day? Is it all that I’d tell my best friend over a glass of Shiraz at my kitchen counter? Or what I’d reveal to my husband before falling off to sleep? No. It’s not even close. I think of my Facebook page and “wall” as a very public place (because, you know, it is). For me, it’s more like a place to chat the way I’d speak to new acquaintances at a wedding reception. Or other parents on the playground after school. Or how I’d talk to my husband’s colleagues at a cocktail party. (In fact some of my “friends” are his colleagues.) And I enjoy it.
Facebook is useful in my work as a writer. If I’m writing a parenting column and need one last quote to round it out, posting a quick status update will yield dozens of witty, intelligent quotes that I can either use (with the poster’s permission) or follow up on with a phone call or email. It’s useful in my friendships. I have friends who live everywhere from Laguna Beach, California to Cambridge, England to Lusaka, Zambia. I love being able to be (at least virtually) present with them and read about their children’s birthday parties or professional wins or even, yes, what they made for dinner that night. (Really, I’d never thought to use beets like that. And with goat cheese? Brilliant!) But, it’s not the primary place where I “do” my friendships.
Some of my dearest friends, including my husband, swear they will never go on Facebook. (I have one friend who communicates – no kidding – via postcards. Yes, some of them are sent from his vacations, but he also proposes dates for a dinner parties by handmade postcard. I find one of his cards in the mail, check my calendar, and send off a letter to confirm or to suggest alternate dates. Back and forth it goes until we find a time to get together. Is it the quickest, most efficient way to plan an event? No, but I love the way he re-purposes theater playbills and peculiar print ads into these cards. I'm charmed by him. Needless to say, he’s not on Facebook.)
I have met new friends on Facebook, connected with old ones, and have been able to be in vital – not virtual – relationship with many people thanks to their posts. From a FB update, I learned last fall that someone I knew decades ago was coming to town and needed somewhere to stay. I clicked “Like” and then invited him to stay at my house. So, a week or so later, we were sitting on my back porch, laughing and talking the night away, like we did back in college. Another friend posted something about her husband being out of town and that her basement was filling with water during a hard rain. I grabbed my husband (I mean, he has the time as he’s not “Facebooking”) and sent him over to her house a few blocks away with a shop vac.
For me, the best choice in terms of Facebook transparency is to be honest and authentic – and to refrain from sharing the hard edges of conflict with my colleagues or my children (my son and I are Facebook “friends”) or from complaining about the new service schedule at church (Oh, and for the record George, I actually like the new schedule a lot) or stressing over the fact that I’ll never meet a writing deadline (I’m Facebook “friends” with some of my editors, too.)
Some of my dearest friends, including my husband, swear they will never go on Facebook. (I have one friend who communicates – no kidding – via postcards. Yes, some of them are sent from his vacations, but he also proposes dates for a dinner parties by handmade postcard. I find one of his cards in the mail, check my calendar, and send off a letter to confirm or to suggest alternate dates. Back and forth it goes until we find a time to get together. Is it the quickest, most efficient way to plan an event? No, but I love the way he re-purposes theater playbills and peculiar print ads into these cards. I'm charmed by him. Needless to say, he’s not on Facebook.)
I have met new friends on Facebook, connected with old ones, and have been able to be in vital – not virtual – relationship with many people thanks to their posts. From a FB update, I learned last fall that someone I knew decades ago was coming to town and needed somewhere to stay. I clicked “Like” and then invited him to stay at my house. So, a week or so later, we were sitting on my back porch, laughing and talking the night away, like we did back in college. Another friend posted something about her husband being out of town and that her basement was filling with water during a hard rain. I grabbed my husband (I mean, he has the time as he’s not “Facebooking”) and sent him over to her house a few blocks away with a shop vac.
For me, the best choice in terms of Facebook transparency is to be honest and authentic – and to refrain from sharing the hard edges of conflict with my colleagues or my children (my son and I are Facebook “friends”) or from complaining about the new service schedule at church (Oh, and for the record George, I actually like the new schedule a lot) or stressing over the fact that I’ll never meet a writing deadline (I’m Facebook “friends” with some of my editors, too.)
On Facebook, I think of myself as standing in a very public place, so whatever I say can by overhead by everyone there. Sure, I'll show you a picture of my kids, I will talk about something I’m reading, I’ll share a link to my blog or to an article I recently published. But the most intimate struggles I'm wrangling with? Nope. So, using Facebook, for me, is not about being falsely cheerful or refusing to share the ugliest parts of my life, but about remembering who is in the room.
(And that would be…everyone.)
(And that would be…everyone.)
