The Uneasiness of Facebook

I've already blogged the fact that I am a member of Facebook--That's no secret. But I haven't blogged the Facebook secrets themselves. Do we really want ourselves to be naked to the world?

You know how often it happens in the political world... Someone does all the right campaigning and does/says all the right things to get he or she elected. Then something "comes up" in the media that happened to them ages ago. "Oh, I forgot about that..." Too late... Time for damage control.

This last week I happened to be looking at my Friends list on my Facebook page. "Hmm," I thought, "That's odd--I wonder what happened to Mark and Dana?" (For those that don't know, Mark is my son in Los Angeles and Dana is his lovely wife.) I thought about it for a little bit. I was sure I had sent them an invite and I was sure they had replied with acceptance. I checked my emailed notifications, and sure enough--There it was. So what was going on? I was just about to send one of them an email when it hit me: They took me off, and for good reason. Why?

The unforeseen Facebook Danger Zone.

On Mark's Friends list was, of course, his mother. While I have nothing bad to say about her or to her, she has apparently avoided contacting me during the last 3 decades for reasons of her own. Either she mentioned me and my Facebook to him, or he and/or Dana had a moment of realization and said, "Whoa" and removed me for everyone's best interests. Then there is the possibility of his dad. While he isn't known as a Friend on either of their Facebook pages, I suppose he could be lurking in the background and he may have serious animosity towards me. At any rate, those are just examples.

There have already been situations where I have removed people from my Friends list. Maybe it was the frequency of mundane updates (those automatic things that pop up when they play a farming game or whatever), or maybe it was just a little feeling of unease about them being there. It's hard to put your finger on it sometimes, but the way I figure it, if someone's presence in your cyber-world makes you the teeniest bit uneasy, they shouldn't be there.

It's nice to be able keep up with Sarah on Facebook and to be able to follow her into her college life, but I wonder how many times these same feelings of uneasiness have cropped up in her mind. Now that I'm on there, she may have second thoughts about her privacy. I don't need Facebook to chat with her--We both have Gmail chat for that any time we want or need it.

I keep thinking about it. How much to I want the world to know about me? Anyone that knows me knows that I have all kinds of times when I have bared my inner self to the world. There are other times when I wonder about the skeletons in the closet that I may have forgotten about.

Facebook: Love it or leave it? The jury is still out, but they're still discussing it. The verdict will probably come soon.