Week 9: Social Networking

I've been on Facebook for several months now, and have enjoyed reconnecting with old friends, distant family members, and local acquaintances whom I don't see very often. I've moved around quite a bit as an adult and have never liked losing touch with old friends, but life is busy. I don't like talking on the phone. I've maintained a lot of contacts via email and find Facebook to be another managable avenue for doing so. Now that the initial excitement has worn off, I don't allow it to be a time waster--I can quickly check it once or twice a day (just as I do email), and move on. I still connect with one or two people a week, and learned last week that a former student who is my daughter's age will be attending the same out-of-state college. I doubt I would have learned this without a Facebook account, at least not until they ran into each other on campus next year!



I found the articles regarding privacy settings most helpful--I am careful to only post information that I would not mind my mother (nor my mother in law) seeing, but I plan to sort my friends into different categories--when a 15 year old son of a friend "friended" me and I accepted, his angst-filled news feed quickly became something I didn't want to read, nor did I want his posts appearing on my wall. I did some digging and figured out how to set limitations, but I want to do a more organized, thorough job of this.