“It would be sad if our desire to sustain and develop on-line friendships were to be at the cost of our availability to engage with our families, our neighbors and those we meet in the daily reality of our places of work, education and recreation.” Pope Benedict XVI (Pope warns against too much Facebook. Michael Paulson, Boston.com, January 23, 2009)
Are on-line friendships really friendships or are they a type of false interaction that allows people to withdraw from society while touting the fact that they have thousands of friends? Pope Benedict XVI clearly believes that sites such as Facebook don’t involve real human interaction. Hundreds of thousands of teenagers and adults would disagree with the Pope on this one. But the fact that the leader of the world’s Catholics would feel it necessary to even comment about a social networking site hints at the importance of social networking and the websites that people use to connect.
Facebook was launched in 2004 as an online place for Harvard students to connect. Just five years later, it is difficult to find anyone on the planet that hasn’t at least heard of Facebook. What is it about an online community that draws people in and entices them to sign up? I watched my kids and would laugh at the three of them sitting on the couch all with their laptops “talking” to each other. When my son would come home from college with his friends, they would all gather in the family room with their computers and immediately log on to their Facebook accounts. They were communicating with each other and yet the room was silent. They communicated in their own world with their own language. As a parent, I knew I needed to understand this language if I was going to be able to check on my kids. So I signed up for my very own Facebook account.
I still tell everybody that the only reason that I have an account is to monitor my kids. I think that some people might even actually believe me. But the truth is, I’m hooked. I’ve reconnected with friends from high school and middle school. I’ve found old friends from my neighborhood as well as my biological sisters. I put great thought into what my status is going to be for the day. I’ve discovered that my “true” character from the seventies is MaryAnn, the rock band I should identify with is Blink 182 and the 80’s movie I’m most like is Princess Bride. This is important stuff I tell you! All this stuff may seem silly on the surface, but I do believe it plays an important role.
When my teenage boys decided to learn to cook, they dove in with both feet (or all four feet as the case may be). They turned out to be pretty good cooks. With every success, I changed my status to indicate how proud I was of my boys and their cooking. They would smile and laugh when they logged in and saw my status but I knew they were proud of themselves and happy that I was proclaiming it to the world. I also took the opportunity to change my status to: “Happy that my boys are turning into great cooks but I think the next two lessons need to be how to clean up after cooking and how to not use every bowl/pot/utensil in the kitchen.” The next time they cooked, they used one bowl, one pot and two spoons. And they cleaned up after themselves. Now, I’ve been nagging them for years to clean up after themselves and it goes in one ear and out the other. But posting that on Facebook brought immediate results. I talk to my kids every day and we have a wonderful relationship but there is something about seeing things in print that spurs action. And I can also react to what I see on their profiles.
I read their status every day and I know if they are feeling down or need some help with something. It is much easier for them to send something out into cyberspace than it is to say it one on one. That might be bad or it might be good, I’m not one to judge since I’ve never parented teenagers that weren’t hooked up to the internet. But I know that my kids put things on their profile, knowing that I am going to see it, that I would have never wanted my parents to know. Is it their way of reaching out? I don’t know, but I do know that Facebook sometimes makes me a better parent.
Facebook gives everybody a chance to communicate on a level playing field. Homework assignments can be discussed. Parents can share children’s pictures with friends and family thousands of miles away. And a parent of a diabetic child can receive guidance in the middle of the night from a friend a world away. Facebook has changed the way we communicate and collaborate. I see my friends comparing photos of quilt squares that they are going to put together for a competition and laugh when I realize that they live on opposite coasts. There really is no limit to the communication possibilities on Facebook. Maybe the Pope should get his own page and see what all the fuss is about!
https://www.boston.com/news/local/articles_of_faith/2009/01/pope_warns_agai.html
https://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebookhttps://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/facebook_inc/index.html?inline
https://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/facebook_inc/index.html?inline
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