The Good and the Bad About Facebook

At its best Facebook is a terrific social networking tool that allows you to stay in touch with family and friends.

It enables you to find those who you have lost touch with including friends from when you were in high school and college, those you might have worked with many years ago, even kids you grew up with half a century ago.

You get to resurrect relationships, catch up on life changing events, share pictures and videos, wish someone a Happy Birthday. There are a lot of benefits.

However Facebook comes with plenty of negatives and I’m not even going to bring up that some experts feel strongly that it’s bad for one’s mental health, especially teen-agers and young people.  I guess I just did bring that up but I’ll move on.

Clearly for some it becomes addictive and they feel the need the constantly check their Facebook account until they finally fall asleep.  That is not the case for me but there are aspects of the platform that concern me.

Let’s first start with friend requests.  What do you do when you get one that you really don’t want to accept?  I seem to get several each week from people who I either don’t know or might only be aware of through a mutual acquaintance.

If I see we have 20, 30 or even 50 mutual friends I will usually accept but when there might be only a couple it makes me question if it’s worth it.  I will admit that having many Facebook friends is a positive for me because I share work-related things like my Hometown View.

At the same time I’m also using it to post family pictures and more and you have to be careful in this day and age about how open you want to be with certain aspects of your life.  Of the 2,433 “friends” I currently have there are many I would likely not recognize if I came in contact with them although as I get older that’s true for people I’ve known well for a long time. That’s another subject I’ve already broached in the past.

By the way I rarely and do mean rarely ever request a friend on my end for two reasons.  One, for ego purposes they should be asking me to be their friend and two, I don’t know if I could accept them deleting my request.  Talk about a blow that could lead to low self-esteem?

Anyway if you are a Facebook friend of mine then it’s nice to be connected…if not what are you waiting for. I promise to accept (well maybe).