Facebook is a drug.

I haven't been one to follow many online fads for the most part, or at least the things like blogging I try to do in a genuinely honest and productive manner. I try to record things here that I believe will have some value to someone, be it my children many years from now who want to be able to see what their father was like earlier in his life, or for those people that I really should be talking to more frequently but seldom get the chance to, so I hope they can follow along with my silly life on this journal.

Facebook is like online marijuana. It robs one of the motivation to actually convey more thought or feeling than can be said in one or two rudimentary sentences. I've had the very fortunate reconnection with people on Facebook that I may have never had otherwise, and it's also enabled me to open up lines of communication to relatives I care about but never get to see. I can even say that Facebook has enabled me to see a different side of some people that I would likely completely missed in any other context, and that's been a positive thing, but the big problem has been this sense of complacency that I've had with Facebook. I've been perfectly happy to just click on the "Like This" button to show my agreement with someone's feelings. I've been lazy in just using an emoticon or two, and giving a 2-3 word attaboy where I really should have expounded on my feedback. I really need to block applications like Mafia Wars and Cafe World, not just because I'm aware of the deceptive marketing practices of Zynga, but because I actually think at times that when I send some virtual gift in one of these inane time-wasting games I'm giving someone something of value.

Am I gonna quit Facebook? No, but I will focus my online energies a little more positively on constructive pursuits rather than the quick fix of a hit from Facebook. There's a place for Facebook, and for some people who have a hard time communicating in little more than a few sentences, it can be a good thing. The problem I have is that it also makes people censor themselves, ok not everyone does (lord knows, some people there need to!), but many people don't write what they truly feel or mean out of fear that everyone else reading the posts may judge it harshly. I know I do this very thing.

I'll still be over there, but much less, and I'm gonna try to be over here writing for myself more often.