Facebook: Blessing or Curse?

Facebook has been a wonderful vehicle to keep in touch with people you don’t get to see often. It allows for busy mothers and others to keep communications with friends open because you can reply when you have time, unlike the pressure of feeling like you have to answer the phone when it rings because you don’t know when the person on the other end is going to have time to talk again.

Facebook has been a blessing in the sense it’s helped me to connect with people all over the globe that share similar interests. It’s also been great with educating myself about other cultures and attitudes of other regions.

With Facebook, though, the normal social filters are removed. You are no longer having a one on one conversation, or just talking with a small group of people at a get-together. Now when you have something to say, you’re saying it to your entire friends list, and sometimes even the people on your friends’ friends lists! You now have a potentially gigantic international audience 24 hours a day rather than just a small, intimate conversation over coffee on a Saturday afternoon.

Because of this, people learn different things about you. And you about them. And they might be things you don’t like and realize you don’t want this person as your friend after all.

Wouldn’t it be a perfect world to wake up, read your friends’ status updates, and just celebrate who they are?

I believe all of us are searching for acceptance. If you’re a very sensitive individual, you’re not going to find that on Facebook, so don’t even look there.

We now have the ability to “unfriend” people who have said something we didn’t agree with.

That’s not enough? You can still see that person’s posts? Well, you can block them too! This virtual world of “friends” is a place where you can literally make a person disappear. In real life you might worry about running into them at the corner store or gas station, but not on Facebook! Once you’re blocked, you’re gone! It’s as if your very irritating existence has been snuffed out in an instant.

I have to wonder how this is going to affect us as human beings and the influence it will have on our human relationships. Will we learn to treat people as throw-a-way objects instead of people with real feelings and real opinions? I don’t like what you believe in, so I will block you so I don’t have to pay any attention to you anymore!

It seems like we have to put a lot less effort into learning how to accept someone for who they are.

The internet is making the world a smaller place, but is that because we keep blocking people out of our lives?

There’s a real challenge before us now in this digital age: can we really learn how to communicate, and really accept others despite our differences? Or will you just block me after reading this?