Friday, January 14, 2011

blog vs. facebook

As anyone can tell, I have certainly favored updating my facebook status in the past months rather than writing a new post for the blog. That makes me wonder why...

Facebook is fast. It's a summary, a synopsis, a sentence or two. There is no expectation to craft sentences well or organize paragraphs.

Facebook is relatively shallow. Am I avoiding sharing too openly these days? Perhaps that's because my life is not just my life anymore; it is shared with my husband. He is not as ready to share details of his life on the internet, so maybe I am more hesitant to share details of our shared life with just anyone, out of respect for him and his boundaries.

Facebook is interactive. Most of the time I write for myself, to process thoughts or to document an idea or a moment. But, if I were writing only for me, couldn't that be done in a personal journal or a private file on my computer? If I am publishing these thoughts externally, that supposes that I have some expectation that others are reading my words and might give feedback. It is much easier for people to respond to facebook posts with a "like" or a comment.

Facebook is more convenient. I can access it from my blackberry, and I do often. Not so with the blog. I know my browser can go to blogger.com, it's just not as simple as accessing facebook on my phone.

All of that being said, I like writing and I think I should do it more often. Rather than just typing one or two sentence status updates on facebook, perhaps it would be nice to write some words here every now and then. I don't have high expectations for returning to a very high volume of blogging, but it's good that I've broken the ice so that additional posts may follow whenever I feel moved to share something.

2 comments:

Erin said...

Yay blogs! :-)

Ruth said...

I agree! It's been great to read your blog and I'm excited to get back in the groove of writing a bit more regularly.