What's Facebook?

What's Facebook? Well by definition it must be a book of faces; so here's mine!
OK, so I'm a little younger than I am now, but this is me! Kinda cute, huh!

I'm new to facebook, and as a __aged new G-mom facebook has been an eye-opening experience. I know it's been around a while, but I was personally introduced to it by my daughter as a way of staying connected to family and get to see all those grand-baby pictures I adore!
(OK, so you guessed by now that this is a picture of me when I was a lot younger!)

A big plus to facebook is you can make friends fast! Which is definitely a plus if you tend to be on the shy side like me. I made 30 friends in 30 days! I've never been able to do that in my whole life! OK, so some of those folks are family, and everyone knows you can't choose your family , but it's nice to have a base you can count on! (I do have a relative who hasn't accepted me yet, but 'Oh Well"!

Another big plus has been the ability to connect with people from your past! You can type in your High School and the year that you graduated and VOILA! there appears a list of former class mates! Only catch is that they have to have preceded you on signing up on facebook!
I was able to connect with a good friend throughout school, including HS and also a friend with whom I had lost touch. She was my very first friend in the whole world! We used to play in the sandbox together! We even spoke to each other for over an hour in REALtime on the phone on New Year's Eve! You can connect with people across the country(probably the world) right from the comfort of your own home, right on your PC! Great! Right?

So is there a down side? Well, it can pull you away from the REAL world, and distract you from your real family and current friends. So much so that some would say it's addictive. I understand that some have adopted virtual lives for their real lives! I think that's sad! There are also games you can play on facebook that can be fun, but you can also get sucked into over-doing that as well!
There's also the potential to get hurt by your friends on facebook; either accidentally or on purpose. People can ignore you, people don't have to be your friends, people can say mean or catty things, and people can accidentally miss your posts, and that can make you sad. So when that happens you find yourself engaging in interactions just as you would in the real world.

So, facebook has to be taken with a grain of salt and kept in balance along with everything else that is going on in your life. It can be a vehicle for easy communication, but it can never replace the time spent in real world face-to-face interactions with family, friends and loved ones.
Nothing can replace having dinner with someone or picking up the phone and talking to someone one on one in real time!