Final Thoughts

Sigh.

When I said that I knew my words would be unpopular it was because I knew that the nature of man wouldn’t let someone express her feelings without wondering if she was making a personal attack or judgment. Why do we do this to each other? If one woman expresses her opinion that homemade cherry pie is the most loving gift she has offered her family today, someone, somewhere is going to look at the bag of Oreos on the table and think,” Well, she must think I am the worst wife/mother in the world.” (I just heard the Highlander in my head, “There can be only one!” which kind of creeps me out so I’ll move along.) And I also knew that we in the Catholic blogging community (as much as I love it) have the tendency to reduce things down to black and white. If X is good then Y must be bad! If A is right then B must be wrong!

When I wrote this post about feeling left behind, I wrote just that. My feelings. Not my opinions. In fact, if you go through that post bit by bit, you will find a significant lack of opinion but an awful lot of feelings. I feel left behind. I felt anxious. I felt like Professor X (which was as weird as Sean Connery in my head from before). I feel an affection for the blogging medium. I feel welcome here. I feel sad that some online friends have chosen to spend more of their time using social networking and have devoted less time to their blogs because I miss them. One of the first things I heard myself ask while looking at some Twitter pages was, “Why didn’t she blog that?” You hear yourself ask questions, too, right?

None of the words I used to describe social networking have any implied negative connotations. Any such connotations can only be assumed by the reader. Fast food is simply fast food, not good or bad. I have never written any sort of condemnation of fast food, in fact, I would gladly total up the number of times my kids have been fed from the drive-thru windows of Wendy’s, Sonic and the like in the past six months. I’ll need to borrow some fingers and toes. I also used the word chatter (which is simply defined as talking rapidly), conversation and virtual noise. And when I joked about the wall, I was only poking fun at the designers of Facebook, not the users. Seems a little silly to me to encourage people to visualize a wall on a network designed to bring people together. That was not intended as a personal attack or a judgment nor was anything else I wrote and it pains me to think that anyone chose to interpret it that way.

I also never said that I didn’t see the benefit of social networking in some capacity, just that when blogging friends start using social networking as the preferred means of communication it cuts off communication with those people who previously enjoyed their company or it pressures those readers into jumping on the bandwagon too. More than one person has commented to my privately that they felt they had to join to stay in the loop but that this communication overload was also creating serious computer burnout.

Anyway, I am not here to bang the gavel and declare what is right and what is wrong. I simply wanted to write how I felt in case there were other people feeling the same way. Apparently there were and I thank each and every one of those commenters who told me so!