Fab Feb - Facebook
✅Alcohol free
❌Fitness
Like many people, I have a love and hate relationship with Facebook.
At Christmas I felt overwhelmed by all the people putting up Christmas greetings. I feel similarly about birthday wishes so I don't often do them myself. I'm more likely to send private messages because they feel more genuine.
For a month after Christmas I pulled right back from participating in Facebook, only posting about work related aspects of my life and hardly interacting with anyone except on Messenger. I am still trying to work out a level of involvement that feels right. Right for me, that is.
In general, I see Facebook as a positive force. I love it for the updates from friends I rarely see and from people with whom I would otherwise lose contact because our lives have moved on from what was once regular contact, typically work colleagues.
Much of my news comes to me first via Facebook, otherwise by my daily emails from New York Times, The Squiz and The Briefing. I follow The Guardian and The Conversation on Facebook, and ABC News somehow has articles pop up that are of interest to me from time to time. And, of course, people tag me in items related to snakes, a result of me posting links to snake articles with the comment "I hate snakes".
I follow a number of writing related Facebook pages that I find encouraging, in the main. Sometimes, when I'm buried under other tasks, updates from these pages are depressing reminders of a love I'm neglecting.
When I like local businesses (eg Grosgrain Homewares) or I want to support what friends are doing (eg The Vinyl Edge and The Financial Feminist), I follow their pages. I also follow some other pages that can be helpful, such as Kuring Gai Police and Live Traffic NSW.
I am part of a handful of groups on Facebook. Some are related to teaching, one is for research students in Education at my university, one is a feminist book club of which I'm a member, the #28bysamwood community and one is my church community which is great for someone like me who rarely attends. Being a member of the Commerce, Business, Economics and Legal Studies Group was such a blessing last year when it provided more than half of the participants for my MRES questionnaire. However, it's taken a while to work out how to limit some of the more prolific groups appearing on my regular timeline.
People use Facebook in different ways. On one extreme I have a friend who posts several times a day. Towards the end of her PhD she could post more than 50 times in one day. I counted a few times just to check that I didn't have an inflated impression. When I'm feeling stressed in other aspects of life, prolific Facebook posters become overwhelming, so I am inclined to put them on mute until I have more headspace. On the other extreme are the lurkers who don't post but read everything, or have accounts that they don't actually use. At one stage I stopped following a couple in this category, thinking that I didn't like that they were learning a lot about me when I was receiving little in return. I have some regrets there. I also have regrets about a number of friends from my first teaching position who I dropped off Facebook as part of my shedding of the school when I moved on. My way of dealing with the stress of change.
I used to find the more flippant aspects of Facebook fun but once they became more about marketing I decided to manage them more. The list of names thing, you know, where it says something like, the women listed below are going to find true love this month, is particularly grating. In these cases, I block the originator of the post, usually some fun Facebook page looking for more followers to gain more sponsorship. I have also taken to dropping some of the likes I did when Facebook was more about connecting over the things you had in common by putting out there who you are.
As for my usage of Facebook, it is constantly changing, hopefully evolving and improving. A while back, when I wondered out loud to a friend about how to handle the brag factor of posting while travelling overseas, she advised to take a photo of the day approach, which I did. More recently, when I travel, the daily photo has been accompanied by a blog post. I figured if I could do daily posts while being a busy tourist I could also do it for #FabFeb. I'm still working out how I want to use Facebook. I want to interact with friends there but I feel a pressure to be fair and consistent. However, now as I write this I realise that sounds like I'm a teacher interacting with my students. I need to relax and not worry so much!
There are ethical grounds on which I could ditch Facebook with all the selling of data and the way it is used for political manipulation. There are the concerns with how much time I spend on it, time I should spend reading books, writing more or researching. There are also continuous concerns about privacy but then again, I'm always oversharing on blog posts that are completely in the public domain.
Facebook kind of evokes a fight or flight response but at least, for now, I'm staying.
Much of my news comes to me first via Facebook, otherwise by my daily emails from New York Times, The Squiz and The Briefing. I follow The Guardian and The Conversation on Facebook, and ABC News somehow has articles pop up that are of interest to me from time to time. And, of course, people tag me in items related to snakes, a result of me posting links to snake articles with the comment "I hate snakes".
I follow a number of writing related Facebook pages that I find encouraging, in the main. Sometimes, when I'm buried under other tasks, updates from these pages are depressing reminders of a love I'm neglecting.
When I like local businesses (eg Grosgrain Homewares) or I want to support what friends are doing (eg The Vinyl Edge and The Financial Feminist), I follow their pages. I also follow some other pages that can be helpful, such as Kuring Gai Police and Live Traffic NSW.
I am part of a handful of groups on Facebook. Some are related to teaching, one is for research students in Education at my university, one is a feminist book club of which I'm a member, the #28bysamwood community and one is my church community which is great for someone like me who rarely attends. Being a member of the Commerce, Business, Economics and Legal Studies Group was such a blessing last year when it provided more than half of the participants for my MRES questionnaire. However, it's taken a while to work out how to limit some of the more prolific groups appearing on my regular timeline.
People use Facebook in different ways. On one extreme I have a friend who posts several times a day. Towards the end of her PhD she could post more than 50 times in one day. I counted a few times just to check that I didn't have an inflated impression. When I'm feeling stressed in other aspects of life, prolific Facebook posters become overwhelming, so I am inclined to put them on mute until I have more headspace. On the other extreme are the lurkers who don't post but read everything, or have accounts that they don't actually use. At one stage I stopped following a couple in this category, thinking that I didn't like that they were learning a lot about me when I was receiving little in return. I have some regrets there. I also have regrets about a number of friends from my first teaching position who I dropped off Facebook as part of my shedding of the school when I moved on. My way of dealing with the stress of change.
I used to find the more flippant aspects of Facebook fun but once they became more about marketing I decided to manage them more. The list of names thing, you know, where it says something like, the women listed below are going to find true love this month, is particularly grating. In these cases, I block the originator of the post, usually some fun Facebook page looking for more followers to gain more sponsorship. I have also taken to dropping some of the likes I did when Facebook was more about connecting over the things you had in common by putting out there who you are.
As for my usage of Facebook, it is constantly changing, hopefully evolving and improving. A while back, when I wondered out loud to a friend about how to handle the brag factor of posting while travelling overseas, she advised to take a photo of the day approach, which I did. More recently, when I travel, the daily photo has been accompanied by a blog post. I figured if I could do daily posts while being a busy tourist I could also do it for #FabFeb. I'm still working out how I want to use Facebook. I want to interact with friends there but I feel a pressure to be fair and consistent. However, now as I write this I realise that sounds like I'm a teacher interacting with my students. I need to relax and not worry so much!
There are ethical grounds on which I could ditch Facebook with all the selling of data and the way it is used for political manipulation. There are the concerns with how much time I spend on it, time I should spend reading books, writing more or researching. There are also continuous concerns about privacy but then again, I'm always oversharing on blog posts that are completely in the public domain.
Facebook kind of evokes a fight or flight response but at least, for now, I'm staying.
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