Second thoughts
Hi, all. My friend, Karen, wrote a great comment in response to my post a couple weeks back (entitled “You aren’t anybody if you’re not on Facebook”). I have her permission to share it with all of you. I want to, in part, because I felt uneasy with something about that post ever since I hit the Publish button. Her comment gives me a chance to revise my stance and revisit her always-insightful thoughts.
“I have no such feelings about Facebook or Instagram, though I use them both. However, what you’ve described is one of the main reasons I stopped blogging, actually. I would feel this small surge of relief when I was doing or experiencing something blog-worthy. I’d start mentally phrasing out how I would present this or that event while I was experiencing it, and like you said, it took me away from the experience and into the framing of it. Sort of like when everyone used to videotape the kid birthday parties rather than participating in them.
“On a related note, I also felt something like this way back when I was in therapy. After the first couple of months, when all the veins of my childhood were unmined, when I was suffering through a terrible divorce, I just went in there and let loose. Then came the times when a little something would happen and I would think, ‘Oh, good, I can talk about this in therapy this week.’ Soon after that, I graduated with my therapist’s good wishes.”
Oh, yeah, that’s right: we’re all different. So, it’s not that Facebook or blogging or whatever takes us out of the moment. It’s that we humans take ourselves out of our present moments sometimes, and when we are determined to do so, we each have our favorite ways of doing that. At least, that’s where I go after considering Karen’s response to my post. My aforementioned uneasiness, I think, originated because my post had a hint of judgmental-ness to it: I don’t do Facebook, and see how these people who do get pulled out of being in the moments they’re in. As if, as a non-Facebook user, I was immune to this effect.
But wait, it gets better: I plan to start using Facebook for work purposes soon. How’s that for irony?
...Like the Hurricane 
I am a daily user of Facebook. I get far more information about my family on Facebook than I ever did by email or phone calls or snail mail. I love the photos. I must admit I get a little annoyed at the smugness of some who are not on Facebook who deride the use of social media. I am not wed to it. I enjoy posting photos, get tired of too much political stuff and have reconnected with lost friends and family. I would never know what my great nephews in Oregon were doing or even what one baby looks like without FB. I see nothing bad about being connected to people you don’t get to see or to whom you can’t talk on a regular basis. FB helps me know what my family and friends are doing. I enjoy it.