Facebook is celebrating its fifth birthday.
All Mohler has written a few reflections here. Carl Trueman has an extensive article here. I love it! It’s so wonderfully curmudgeonly.
I wrote something a while ago here. I should point out that I’ve since joined Facebook. I weakly caved in to overwhelming peer pressure! As I suspected, it’s been both a useful tool to connect with people but also an unhelpful distraction. I’ve hooked up with a number of old friends with whom I’d lost contact. It’s proved an easy way of informing lots of people of lots of things. I’m not sure they’ve taken much notice. It’s just added to the background noise of life. As Trueman has suggested, it’s taken me quite a while to get comfortable with the concept of the Facebook ‘friend’. It doesn’t mean what it says! Acquaintance or contact would be more accurate, but just less friendly!
Good articles. Its an issue I’ve had to rethink in the last few weeks because I’ve discovered the way I (someone in their late 20s) use these tools and someone in the teens uses them are different. It’s not variants on a theme its a different understanding and one I can’t get my head around.
Comment by John Lumgair — February 9, 2009 @ 10:39 am
I am more sympathetic to the arguments of Carl than I would have been a year ago. I know he is slightly playing to type but would a teenager remotely understand what Carl is talking about. He comes across as grumpy and not much fun to hang around with. I am not clear exactly what his point is, Should we be like him just post our sensible writings on a blog? I facebook post is guaranteed to get hits/comments in the blogsphere.
I have not forayed into Twitter but presumably it one can Twitter about Christ or God and it be good and beneficial.
Comment by Tom Stanbury — February 9, 2009 @ 5:58 pm