Lift Up Your Hearts!

I use Facebook to support relationships and as a writing platform. What else?

I suppose I should be ashamed to admit this, but for me Facebook is also a major source of news. But I do not apologize for that, because I have a few friends who can be counted on to post on Facebook whenever something important is happening in the world. I know from life-long experience that mainlining the news is bad for my mental health.

Is Facebook the best or only tool for this use?

These particular friends can usually be counted on for two very important benefits: (1) each brings a different background and point of view to the table; (2) in addition to the news that makes headlines, they often alert me to news that would be lucky to make two inches on page 32 but which is of interest to me; and (3) they present the news with far less stress-inducing drama than most mainstream media. I know of no other site that does such an excellent job of curating my news.

Many years ago, when I lived in Rochester, a good friend would call me on the phone nearly every day, and we'd chat for ages. (Those were the days when the phone was on the wall in the kitchen, and we invested in a 25-foot phone cord so that I could work and talk at the same time.) At the same time, we were trying to drastically reduce the time we spent watching television. To the concern that we would miss something important by not watching the evening news, I would reply, "If it's really important, I'll learn about it from Pam tomorrow."

If I were to give up my Facebook news sources, what could substitute? Given that all news reporting is biased, as newscaster Peter Jennings famously warned more than 15 years ago, that means—as it does with all history studies—a single source is never sufficient. And consulting multiple sources with the same bias doesn't count.

I'm sorry to say that our local newspaper is out. I want to be able to support local, physical papers, but it was decades ago that ours started giving less for more: the space devoted to text steadily shrank, replaced by pictures that definintely were not worth a thousand words. The stories themselves veered away from meat toward fluff. Editing and proofreading efforts declined drastically, perhaps through costcutting measures and/or the need to beat the Internet with a news story. Worst of all was the blurring of the line between news and editorials. We cancelled our subscription when the Orlando Sentinel started to look like USA Today, and haven't been back since, except for responding a couple of times to "an offer you can't refuse"—which never succeeded in convincing us to keep the subscription when it ran out.

Television news has gone all out in the Adrenalin Wars: presenting the news at fever pitch to maximize excitement, fear, and even panic, for the purpose of keeping customers glued to their shows and money pouring in. "Public" television is very nearly as bad—they, too, have customers and sponsors. And all the while each network strongly promotes its own point of view. For the sake of my mental health I don't want the hype; for the sake of my spiritual health I don't want the bias. Watching news shows on more than one network may somewhat balance the bias, but it doubles the hype.

One site that was suggested to me is allsides.com, which attempts to bring together news stories from the Left, from the Right, and from the Center, using criteria it has set up for determining the bias of a news organization. I've bookmarked the site as potentially quite useful. It is frustrating to come across an interesting story and feel that I can't share it, because if the source is a left-leaning site half my friends won't trust it, and if it's a right-leaning site the other half will reject it unread. Allsides.com might at least help me find the same story in different places.

But Allsides is still too much in-your-face with the news for frequent use. The same is true of Google News, which used to be helpful but is much less so since they stopped letting me specify what kinds of stories interest me and now enforce Google Knows Best. In my case, Google Is Usually Wrong. I need to do more research here.

Porter subscribes to the BBC News feed, which seems to do a pretty good job of covering the world. It takes up a lot of his time, however, so I'm just as happy to take it second-hand.

Some well-known and intelligent person once said that he never paid attention to daily, or even weekly news. Only if something was still newsworthy after a month did he bother about it. I think it was Peter Drucker, or someone he wrote about, in Adventures of a Bystander, but I'm still trying to hunt down the exact story and attribution. For all but a few news items (e.g. an approaching hurricane), that sounds like a sane and sustainable philosophy. Being inundated with news—usually tragic—from every corner of the country and the world is exhausting and debilitating. I don't want to stick my head in the sand, but the value of receiving bad news lies in being moved to good and useful action. Otherwise it just cripples us.

My friend Pam and I once lived across a small hallway from each other. Now we are more than 2000 miles apart. But she is still one of my reliable news sources, and Facebook is now that 25-foot long telephone cord. Hour-long phone conversations no longer work for either of us. Facebook really is a good way to reach many people in a very short time. The question is how to maximize benefits and minimize costs.

I have some ideas to try out. Stay tuned.

What else do I use Facebook for, besides communication with friends and family?

Right up there near the top must surely be this: as a writing platform. Writing is to a large extent the way I think, and I like getting my thoughts out of my head and onto some external medium. Moreover, I'm enough of a writer, or perhaps "performer," that I want my words to be seen. My writing is also my brain's equivalent of an external hard drive: a place to store wildly eclectic information for later retrieval—made possible in large measure, I must grudgingly admit, to Google's excellent search capabilities.

Searching is why Facebook is not a good place for writing: retrieving what I have once written is difficult to impossible. Finding what someone else has written is even harder. Facebook's place in my writing habit is primarily threefold:

• What someone else has written will often stimulate thoughts, which I often publish in the form of a comment. The danger of this is that it can all too easily be much too long for the medium, and it's all too easy to hijack someone else's post for my own ideas. (A little of that is good, but I tend to take it too far. One reason I never got hooked on Twitter is that I can't say anything in fewer than 140 words, let alone characters. I tried for a while....) But sometimes the seeds planted develop into posts of my own.

Is Facebook the best or only tool for this use?

Certainly not. Inspiration for writing is everywhere, and there are far more thoughts stimulating my brain than will ever make their way into print.

• Linking to my blog posts from Facebook has opened my work to a greater audience, despite the fact that my blog is public and my Facebook limited to a relatively small circle of friends. Years ago, Facebook had a facility for cross-posting that didn't work well for me, but for a long time now I have been posting to Facebook links to individual blog posts, with maybe a short comment (because I hate it when people just post links without a few words of introduction to tell me why they think the link is valuable).

Is Facebook the best or only tool for this use?

I already know that it can't replace my own blog: I have Faithful Readers who do not use Facebook. And if that weren't enough, I would be thoroughly convinced that I need my own platform by a recent incident in which Facebook deleted my 9/11 tribute, saying it violated their community standards. Is that a community I should remain part of?

Certainly anyone who clicks to my blog through Facebook could get there directly. But it would remove some of the convenience, and eliminate the readers who might be intrigued by a particular post title here and there, but not enough to visit my blog itself with any frequency. It's still an easy way to make my words available to more people.

It also provides more feedback. Those "Like" buttons make it easy to let someone know you've read what they've written, and there's no way to do that on my blog except by leaving a comment, which many people don't like to do. Plus, even of comments I usually get more on Facebook. But that can be part of the problem, too. I'm human: I like to hear when my words have been well received. Not so much when they haven't—I'm not getting paid so I can't be like the columnist who insisted he didn't mind getting hate mail, because it meant his column was being read, which was all that mattered to his employers. But after I've posted a link on Facebook I do find myself checking the app more frequently, to see who has read and reacted to my post. I like those little dopamine hits as much as anyone. But it's probably not a good thing.

Conclusion? If I were to abandon Facebook altogether, I could manage without this. My blog was never about getting widespread publicity anyway. I like for my words to be a blessing to people—as some have said they are—but flying under the radar is more my ambition than going viral. If my decision is to keep Facebook but greatly reduce its hold on me, howere, I think this is something I would keep. If, that is, I can convince myself that I don't need to know now when someone has reacted to my post—a day or even a week later will do.

• Finally, Facebook provides a place for the small, off-the-cuff comments that are fun but don't seem worthy of a blog post: "Hi, everyone! We're enjoying the Food & Wine Festival at EPCOT!" "Here's an inspiring quote I found." "The president said WHAT?" More chit-chat than conversation. I don't mean to belittle it; there's a place for chit-chat in the glue that holds relationships together.

Is Facebook the best or only tool for this use?

I have to admit that it's a good one, and I would miss it. With family I could (and often do) substitute WhatsApp, since we have a lively group there. But when deprived of personal contact, by distance or pandemic, there's some value here that I don't know how to replace. For many, even most, of my Facebook friends it probably doesn't matter a bit, but there is a subset for which I think it does. Maybe not enough benefit for the cost, however. And of course there's always the possiblity certainty that some such comments (e.g. the political ones) do more harm than good....

It was our younger daughter who started it, asking me why I spend time on Facebook. Really, the nerve of our children! Doesn't she remember that she was the one who induced me to join, and who made the first comment on what was then called my "wall"? Back in 2007 that was, and I was entranced by the ease with which I could keep in touch with famiy and friends, and by the ability to find and be found by people who would otherwise have faded out of our lives, or at best become once-a-year-at-Christmas contacts.

But nearly thirteen years have passed since I took those first steps into the world of social media, and I've accepted her challenge to re-evaluate. It came in response to my admiration of our eldest grandson, who had recently made a clean break with a couple of time-consuming activities. They were fun, but the pandemic shutdown revealed to him that he was no longer growing through them. Facebook provided many new opportunities when I first joined, but perhaps there are better uses of my time. "Good" can hardly be considered good enough if it keeps "better" at bay.

Back when we gave up television, there wasn't a lot said about the dangerous nature of the medium; if people complained it was generally about poor content: the "vast wasteland." Marie Winn was one of only a handful who saw the problem as systemic. One day, I wandered with my bibliophile father into a small bookstore in Wayne, Pennsylvania, and in my browsing happened upon her book, The Plug-In Drug, which changed our lives forever. There's no need for such a chance encounter now: googling "Facebook addiction" or "why you should quit social media" will flood you with more information than you can handle.

But I'll leave all that serious stuff about how the intrusiveness of social media, and even something as old-school as e-mail, literally changes our brains, making it very difficult for us to focus on tasks that require sustained attention and hard work. And I'll skip the disturbing part about how all media, from Facebook to news shows to plain ol' TV have been consciously altered to make them as addictive as casino gambling. As I said, you can find out more than you want to know about that with some simple online queries. To my embarrassment, I can see those frightening effects clearly in my own life, but it's enough at the moment to ask, Why do I use Facebook? What do I get out of it? How do I give to others through it? Am I accomplishing anything worthwhile, or just being entertained? What activities in my life are being displaced by social media? Are there other, more helpful and/or less harmful, activities that could be used to accomplish whatever good I see in Facebook?

Not everyone uses Facebook for the same reasons, or in the same way. As they say, your mileage may vary—by a lot.

Facebook began for me as a means of communication with family and friends. Many years ago, when we first moved to Florida, I started sending a more frequent version of a Christmas letter to keep in touch with those we had left behind. First the typewriter, then later the word processor, made it possible to write more content, more frequently, and to more people than I ever did when all my notes were hand-written. Facebook was simply a logical extension of that move.

And for a while it worked well. I could see photos of family and friends, and hear about what our grandchildren were up to. (For the latter, our children's blogs were actually more useful, but eventually those updates stopped and Facebook became more important.) But guess what? Our children have all dropped out of Facebook. None of our grandchildren have social media accounts of any sort, nor do I expect them to. Our nephews still have Facebook accounts, but rarely use them. A few other family members use Facebook occasionally, and there are a couple for whom Facebook is our primary means of communication. But nearly all of the sharing of photos and activities is now done via WhatsApp. Yes, I'm aware that WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, but that's a separate issue. For most, though not 100%, of our family, I think I could disregard Facebook and do as well or better. The same is true for closer friends, those with whom we would keep in touch, even if just once a year, no matter what.

But I have developed a whole new level of friendship on Facebook: something greater than mere acquaintance, though far from what we introverts call real friends. In fact, it's quite an odd form of friendship, in which we learn details about each others' lives that real friends might take years to reveal in person—yet these are people we haven't seen in decades, or maybe have never met at all. One of my first Facebook friends was a (now very much grown up) little girl I haven't seen since the 1980's. To this day she will, every once in a while, "like" one of my Facebook posts.

There are others who became Facebook friends long before we ever met, usually because they were a friend of a friend and we found something in common through our comments on that friend's posts. I suppose it's like going to a party at a friend's house and meeting a new friend there—but for me, much more fun than a party.

When I met a first cousin once removed for the first time at a memorial service, it was especially helpful to have already become acquainted with her and her family via Facebook. When our church called a new priest, I felt almost instantly comfortable with him after he arrived, because I had already gotten to know him some on Facebook. It's still the case that Facebook provides more interaction than I've ever had before with a pastor. It's casual, can be accomplished at times convenient to all, and is done in writing, which is always my preferred form of expression.

That's more than enough ruminating for now, though there are many more aspects of my relationship with Facebook to consider. One thing has become clear: When it comes to some relationships and communication, I would do no worse, and maybe better, if I drop Facebook and put my energy into other areas. And certainly these are the people who deserve the greater share of my time and attention. Yet I'm not willing at this point to drop the new friends and the casual friends, who expand my horizons and provide much-needed encouragement, as I hope I do for them.

The question then, becomes this: Can I radically reduce my Facebook time and attention and not lose those connections? It there something less than total abandonment of social media that will enable me to concentrate on my highest priorities? Is this an "if your right hand causes you to sin..." issue?

Still thinking about that one. There is still much more to consider.

We gave up television in the early 1980's, when we began noticing its negative effects on our toddler. That was a struggle, but to this day I hold it as one of our best parenting decisions ever.

Television had sneaked into our lives in a frog-and-kettle way. My family didn't even own a TV set until I was seven years old, and it received a grand total of four stations: three VHF and one UHF. All was black and white, of course. The influence of the medium in our lives grew only gradually, but by the time my much younger sister was in middle school, she had her own TV in her bedroom.

My television addiction—that's not too strong a word—was effectively broken in college, when the only way to see a show was halfway across campus in the student lounge; it simply was not worth the effort. My husband was deprived of this cold-turkey blessing, since one of his roommates owned a set. Thus after we were married it took the kick-in-the-pants of parenting to get us to make the break.

Television has since become quite a different beast, both for better and for worse, and I acknowledge that the medium has its usefulness. Still, I'm 100% certain that our grandchildren are far better off for growing up in television-free homes.

However, "television" as I once knew it has evolved into audio-visual media of incredible variety, now far more useful and far more dangerous. Our grandchildren may not have television sets, and their "media time" may be restricted, but computers, Kindles, and tablets are still important in their lives.

The use of computers and other "screens" has sneaked up on subsequent generations the way television did on mine. Many parents are as concerned about it all as I was with television, but the option of giving it up completely just isn't there, unless you can live self-sufficiently somewhere in the back of beyond. The new media are even more addictive, and much more time-consuming, than good ol' broadcast TV ever was. But they are too useful to give up completely.

Which leaves us with control as the only practical option, and control is always harder than abstention.

Despite the lengthy introduction, the issue for this post is not how to control media for children, for whom I no longer have any direct responsibility, but for myself.

I'm certain I spend too much time sitting at the computer, but that is where my work is. Not that I'm being paid to work in an office, staring at a screen. But my writing, my genealogical research, my archivists' work, and much of the nitty-gritty of everyday life takes place using the computer/phone. I'm not ready to give up so much of what I consider to be valuable work. And when your children and grandchildren live far away, electronic media is an incalculable blessing.

But something has to give. I'm at the time of life when I need to make sure I'm using my allotted span wisely. Really, that should be all the times of our lives; it just hits home harder when you must face the certainty that you are not going to live another 50 years.

What's the best use of my time? Too big a question. What's the best use of my time on the computer? Better, but still too big to start with. What's the best use for me of social media? Now that's something I might be able to sink my teeth into.

Stay tuned for Facebook: The Challenge.