Thing #18

I have had a Facebook account for a couple of years now. When some of my youth group girls graduated from high school and were getting ready to head off to college, they encouraged me to get an account so we could keep in touch. I had never considered getting an account before. My daughter has a MySpace and Facebook and I thought of those places as her territory and I did not want to intrude. It can be tricky for parents and teens. You want to know what your children are doing and yet when they are off in college you want to respect their privacy also. Lisa was fine with me signing up and even helped me get started and she is, of course, my top friend! She finds it amusing how many parents and church members have an account! It has been fun and quite addictive! (I use that word a lot when I talk about the technology tools I have learned to use!) There was a recent uproar on FB about who owns the contents of your page, even after you cancel your account. And FB seems to be changing their look often, much to the dismay of many members including myself. We have yet to really understand the implications of social networking sites like FB and MySpace. Ii is likely that a future president of the United States will have had a FB page (or some other social networking page)in their youth and may have posted some not so appropriate photos! As a youth leader, I made sure I at least understood what MySpace (the biggest site at that time) was about and cautioned and advised my students about the safety concerns that went along with posting so much personal information on their page. As a student, I like being "friends" with classmates. There have been many times when I have used the instant message feature to talk to a classmate about an assignment I needed help with and vice versa. And recently a close friend was in Alaska and we were able to catch up for a few minutes. I guess that would be appealing to high school students as well, but I am not sure how well it would work since there are so many other interesting, but distracting, features. I do love my FB though! My page is set to private, but send me a friend request if you'd like!