the Facebook experiment . . .

Like blogger, it's taken a while for Facebook to "take" with me. I joined last summer after my cautious oldest out-of-state child said she'd set up a Facebook page for professional reasons. I thought it would be a way for me to connect with her and with out-of-touch professional colleagues. Several in a cohort that is soon to disband had their own Facebook pages. With my daughter, they became my first "friends."

Connecting on Facebook with colleagues at work has been a different story--perhaps because ours is a professional where one misstep in cyberspace today may easily translate into loss of livelihood--position and credentials--tomorrow. But, after two years of blogging on a site easily googled, I figured I wasn't a misstep candidate so . . .

I invited my other daughter to join. She was the natural anyway--and truly uses the tool for what it does best, connecting with old friends before they've grown so old they've forgotten you or grown wary of risk-taking, of stepping out into the unknown. My son--well, he still hasn't mastered sending/responding to personal emails, so I haven't bugged him . . . yet. But it's interesting to note that, in the meantime, I've connected to all my brother's and sister's children :-)

Which brings me to another point--sister and brothers who also don't have Facebook accounts . . .

In the meantime, I've amassed oodles of Flair, joined a group from my mother's hometown across the Atlantic, and begun taking tiny risks--like quizzes (I should have been a detective [aren't I?] and settled down in Italy [close enough to that across-the-Atlantic hometown]). I support my college basketball team (my classmates also aren't on Facebook but the more recent residents of my former dorm are). I dabble in the trivia of what I'm thinking at any given moment--and truly enjoying being more in the know about the lives of those I have so little-face-to-face contact with.

Facebook keeps us close when time and space and the demands of our separate lives would ordinarily dictate otherwise.

The one drawback? Just not the right venue for longer thinking, reflecting. Which is why I'll keep right on blogging :-)