The Three Temptations of Facebook

Jen Fulwiler, who blogs at Conversion Diary and the National Catholic Register has a great article about the temptations that Facebook users have.

Did I mention that she is an Aggie and is a contributor, along with me, in a new book to be released at the end of the summer - "The Church and the New Media"?

Here is a snip of the article:

A while back I did a computer fast where I shut down my computer and put it away completely for an entire week. No email. No web surfing. No Facebook, Twitter or blogging. I didn’t even use my mobile phone for anything other than making actual phone calls. It ended up being an even more illuminating experience than I could have imagined. Not only did my little experiment reveal some stark truths about how I use my time in a typical day, but it showed me just how much my interactions with the online world had impacted my spiritual life, as well.

Naturally, the minute my fast was over I ran back to my computer like I was Richard Gere in the final scene of An Officer and a Gentleman, and these days I’m pretty much back to living as if my laptop were a bodily appendage. But I have remembered some of the lessons I learned during my week of living like it was 1995, and they’ve helped me keep my relationship with Facebook, Twitter and other social media in check. I find that if I can watch out for the following pitfalls, I can (usually) maintain a healthy relationship to the online world:

The Top Three Spiritual Pitfalls of Facebook, Twitter and Other Social Media:

1. Overvaluing your own opinions
In what would end up being one of the most ridiculous moments of my computer fast—perhaps of my entire life—I happened to see a commercial I didn’t like on television, and instinctively reached for my computer to update my social media sites with some pithy commentary about it. When I remembered that that wasn’t an option, I grabbed a pen and paper and jotted down my thoughts to share when I was back online. I think it was at that moment, when I looked down and saw that I had deemed the message “UltraShine shampoo makes women look like Dee Snider” so worthy as to be captured and proclaimed to the world, that I realized that my involvement with social media just might have made me start to overvalue my own opinion.
Continue Reading.