Big Brother Isn't Interested, I Promise

My absence in posting is credited to a number of things. For starters, November through January had me in the first trimester of my second pregnancy. The exhaustion alone was a beat down not to mention the nausea and hormone insanity. Then there was my deep contemplation of the purpose in bothering to post on social media sites because my life isn't that fascinating and I know how irritating the "over-share" has become with regards to Facebook, Twitter, and some blogs. Finally, I had to determine if I actually had anything worth posting. There are far more entertaining bloggers out there (KHam and Grouchy Muffin being two of my favorites). Then a friend of mine on Facebook declared his desire to leave the site because of the useless postings made by thousands daily.

As it is many people, including my mother, refuse to embrace Facebook because they believe if I was truly interested in my "friends'" lives, I would pick up the phone and call. The reality is that life happens and most of the time I simply cannot spare the 10-15 minutes for the a phone call that could have the potential to become an hour long. I'd rather check in on my close friends' pages, and when we finally find time to meet up, we can take all the time we want to chat in person about the goings-on we've either posted about or have happened since the last time we met. 

All the things I love about Facebook are quickly being outweighed by the things I find the most annoying. For starters, I am determined to keep my friends under 300 which I still find to be a number too large to call them all "friends." Therefore, knowing some people have 1, 000+ friends is one of the most ridiculous things I've heard. There is no way one person has an interest in that many people. It is a shallow statement of how friendship is now regarded. (And an accelerated path to digital voyeurism that's been affectionately labeled "Facebook stalking.") Next is the information being shared by my friends that is beginning to become inappropriate.

Facebook isn't the place to unleash an uneducated/unresearched political opinion. Just because a video exists on YouTube doesn't mean it needs to also go viral on Facebook (think recent Kony2012 nonsense). Also, the annoyingly long posts proclaiming that if I love my husband/brother/son/mother/soldier/Christ I will repost are out of control. Really? Not reposting means I have no care or concern for these people? How absurd.

Then there is the disturbingly candid looks into the more intimate parts of peoples' lives. I was one of them. When I finally became pregnant with my son, William, I did it all. I posted the news to Facebook with a picture of my first sonogram containing my son's eerily alien-like profile. I am sure I even updated my condition during the pregnancy more than many of my "friends" deemed necessary. Even now, I see so many posts that expose those parts of life that really have no business being permanently (nothing EVER leaves cyberspace) shared like the amount or color of bodily fluids exiting someone's child while ill or a quick poll about the best type of birth control for a relationship or a person's own personal battle with unidentified body oddities (I itch just thinking about it). To me, there are just some things that I don't need to learn about while simply scrolling through daily posts. How is it these people are so comfortable about sharing such personal problems?

All of this is what led me to keeping my posts shut about my newest pregnancy. I am overjoyed that I am even able to get pregnant a second time, but this time I wanted to keep this to me. This is MY pregnancy. It doesn't belong to people who check in on me once a month. I also wanted to give Baby Ben some of his own privacy rather than upload his first "picture" like I had his brother. I actually did call/text/e-mail my family about the news and allowed that grapevine to circulate before really talking about it openly. I wanted this to be truly joyous news and not more noise in the Facebook over-share chaos.

I am hoping this is more the direction people choose to take with Facebook. I love seeing pictures of families (especially kids) growing and changing. I do enjoy witty posts from some of my more entertaining friends. I have also invested so much time into maintaining a Facebook that people CAN and WANT to check that I shudder at the thought of deleting it all. (Maybe I should give that Google+ thing a try?)