My son was telling me recently all about two of my grandkids “tweeting” updates to their Facebook pages. They live out-of-state and we keep in touch by texting back and forth. He said, “If you ever want to know what we are doing, just check their Facebook pages.” That was intriguing enough to get me to sign up.
So I signed up, got my page, and entered all of my particulars. Am I looking for women? or men? or friendship? or networking? Oh brother. I rolled my eyes. I’m certainly not looking for women, and since I just celebrated my 40th anniversary, I’m not looking for men either. I decided to pick networking. And then it took several tries over a couple of days, with some help from my daughter to get my interests to save on my page. Putting my favorite links where I wanted them was another frustration. It took me a week just to get a photo posted so people would know who I was.
Then I started receiving invitations from possible friends, or friends in common with friends or actual invitations from people I knew who already had pages set up. Some of the names seemed familiar, but my high school days were 42 years ago and college was 15 years ago. No one looked like I remember. Fancy that. Okay, so maybe this wasn’t going to be as easy as it was supposed to be.
And then on my “wall” I began seeing daily tweets from all of my new “friends”. Someone went to the orthodontist and someone likes a tv show I like and someone else was chatting online with another friend and forgot to keep it private. It was almost like the days of party-line telephones. (I’m really telling my age now. Ask your mother or grandmother what that is.)
Anyway, I can read gossip, or post what I did at work today, or complain about my kids. I can post all of my pictures of family and friends. I noticed some people have several albums full of pictures. Does anyone really care about my family’s last Christmas? And is it called eavesdropping when various tidbits of information scroll across your homepage like a news feed?
There are games to play and endless opportunities to waste a lot of time online feeling a little bit like a voyeur. Or, you can join various humane causes and invite all of your friends to join with you. Now that I finally have joined the rest of the country and have my own Facebook page, I’m not really sure exactly what to do with it…
Estherlou's Blog 
One thing Facebook does well is Waste Time. I agree that it’s neat to see all these people you haven’t seen in so many years. But after a while, I ended up deleating everyone I had on there from High School because I ddin’t really care what was going on in their lives. If they weren’t friends then, why did they need to be friends now? Some were semi-friends, but that was almost 20 years ago. I got tired of my news feed being muddled up by them talking about their friends I didn’t know, family I had never met, and lives I was never involved with. I wiped out my friend list until I had the bare minimum of people I really wanted to keep in touch with. Now it is easier to get through the news and care what was going on.
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