Facebook

I have joined many parenting- and homeschool-related Facebook groups over the last few years, as well as groups for mom bloggers. Most of the groups I belong to were started by Christian women seeking to help others.

I think it’s fun to log on, see what people are asking about, give a short answer, and move on to the next item in my news feed, because I enjoy the apparent efficiency of digital communication. It’s on my time, and my terms. I answer what I want, when I want. I can think about what I want to say, write and edit and rewrite until I’m satsified. It feels good to think I might have helped someone work out a problem. So that’s a good thing—right?

Not when you realize the extent to which we can choose what we want to reveal and conceal, and the lack of consequences if we don’t exercise wisdom and discernment. I believe these are reasons Facebook groups offer an enticing alternative to personal discipleship.

As of today, SharperIron has a new Facebook page. The story of why we need a “new” page is a bit technical, boring, and personally embarrassing. (I broke an important feature of the old one, and it happened to be one of those One-Click Facebook Mistakes You Cannot Reverse… Even in a Hundred Clicks.) So we’ll just move on to the fun part.

The IPO (initial public offering) of Facebook stock has not gone as planned. The market value of the shares turned out to be substantially beneath what the owners had hoped and believed. Worse, the value of those shares continues to decline rather than to increase. As I am writing, some pundits are discussing the possibility that the social media site might just die, and a few are even wondering whether its passing will kill the so-called “tech bubble.”

The prospect of a world without Facebook is one that I can face with equanimity. In fact, I have already dealt with this issue. Some months back, I canceled my Facebook account. I have not missed it.

To be fair, I should confess that I was never one of Facebook’s most avid users. When I had an account, I would go weeks and sometimes months without logging in to see whether I had any messages or if someone had written on my wall. I routinely deleted any email notices that came from Facebook. To me, the whole thing was more a bother and even an annoyance than anything.

Not that I didn’t have friends. Quite the contrary. I was being followed by hundreds (or was it thousands?) of people whom I did not know and would not have recognized if I had met them on the street. In fact, looking at my list of friends became a weird experience as I found myself wondering, “Who are these people and why are they watching me?”

Sure, I could have dropped them from the list. In fact, I could have rejected their friend requests at the outset. But that always seemed rude, like answering the phone and then just hanging up.