The more time I spend on Facebook, the less I enjoy it any longer.

It sufficiently keeps me up-to-date on distant relatives and friends but only if I’m willing to spend hours unearthing their individual posts. I’m becoming less interested in doing so. I would rather spend time on the NY Times website reading news or tangling with the day’s crossword.

Mostly, I’m tired of the unoriginality of most people’s FB posts — the borrowed posters with clever sayings, the shared videos gone viral, the obvious truth that people lack communication skills except vicariously through others. This is sad, actually.

I also find troubling how people feel FB is a private forum and they willingly post personal information they would not want published in public. Yet often what they post becomes immediately available to anyone with  a computer and a Facebook account — birthdays, children’s names, upcoming vacations (so thieves will know they’re not home).

They express political and personal viewpoints they likely would never want published in a newspaper. They think that FB is more private when, depending on their privacy settings, it could be spread to an even wider audience than they imagine.

As  much as I dislike FB for my own personal use, I find it invaluable in my business to locate people for interviews and to get leads for stories. I use it to make connections, and to inform and infer.

And for one of my hobbies — genealogy — I’m able to build onto my family tree simply by reading the personal information distant family members post about their immediate families such as children’s names and birthdays. People reveal a lot about themselves in that forum.

Becky Clark,
Editor