Facebook, what can
I say about it other than I absolutely love it! I currently don’t see a
time when I’m not an active member of this particular social networking site.
While I still maintain a MySpace page for those of my friends who choose not to make the leap to Facebook, I unfortunately
don’t visit it nearly as often as I am on Facebook.
What Facebook is for
me, it is an extension of my life, my family and my friends. The people reflected
therein are people that I actually know because they are my family, my friends, people I went to school with, been a coworker
or someone with whom I served in the military.
Facebook has become
important to me I think for probably two main reasons, the first one being the fact that as I’ve already stated, I am
an armature genealogist working on a personal genealogical documentary. I think
Facebook is probably the best tool out there right now for the interactive search of family members, regarding both those
that I have met and remember as well as for those that I am still searching.
Facebook is also a
great way for me to be able to reconnect with those people I went to school with as well as those I serve with in the military. So many years have passed since High School Graduation, so much has happened to each
of us, relocating for jobs and many other reasons, people lose contact with each other.
It’s pretty much the same for those I served with in the military. Some
got out before me while others were still in when I got out, people transfer and get shipped out all over the world. All of this makes it easy to lose contact with people that meant a lot to us.
While it may seem odd
to some folks, I’m not so into making Cyber Friends. I don’t participate
in any of the interactive applications on Facebook such as Mafia Wars or Farmville or any of the others. I think they’re pretty cool and are a great way for people to interact and have fun but they are
just not something that interests me.
The term ‘Cyber
Friend’ for the purposes of this explanation as it applies to my Facebook page basically means… “Any individual
with whom I have no connection through a genealogical tie and/or a person I have never known personally (as
in from school, work, military) and would probably never meet in person.”
While there are a couple
of people who do appear as friends on my Facebook page that I have not actually met in person, they are the children of those
friends that I knew before that child was born, thus establishing the needed (for my purposes) connection.
While some
the above may offend certain individuals, it is not my intention. Rather, all
of the above is only a small part of my continuing efforts in the areas of personal privacy and control.
