Oh, Facebook...

Do you ever notice that there is the one friend or family member you can usually count on to dispel any important information to the rest of your family and friends?  In my family, these people were my mother, and my grandmother on my dad's side.  Between these 2 women, I very rarely needed to tell anyone in my family my own business... that was something they could tell everyone when they were visiting with others.

Now that Grandma has passed on and I'm an adult, I find that the burden of sharing news falls primarily on my own shoulders.  What a lot of work!  However, thanks to the glory of facebook, I can post a status update, and the majority of my family and friends will have immediate access to the news.  And that is exactly what I did last night.

I should stop right here and mention that I don't use FB all that much anymore.  It has gotten old for me... I've been on for so long that I'm entirely bored with it by this point.  So when I post something, I tend to forget that many people are on facebook far, far, FAR more than I am.  Last night, I made a simple change to my relationship status.  I went from "In a Relationship" to "Engaged".  I didn't think it was that big of a deal, because it's just a status, after all.  We've been "Engaged" for a while.  I didn't really make a big deal of it before or during my cousins' wedding, because that was her weekend, not mine.  So I guess it's true, this was the first time I'd made any sort of "announcement" formal or informal.

Dudes...

I had to turn my phone off, because people were so shocked/surprised/eager to congratulate me on being engaged.  Even on vibrate, it was getting to be excessive!  It reminded me of something that Alyx had sent me... it was a quotation from the LDS General Conference that took place last weekend.  I'm not Mormon, but it was profound to me, and I think it applies to this situation perfectly:

President Uchtdorf spoke how people, with the click of a mouse can "connect" with thousands of "friends" without facing a single one of them. "Technology can be a wonderful thing, and it is particularly useful when we cannot be near our loved ones.... However, I believe that we are not headed in the right direction, individually and as a society, when the most frequent way we connect with family or friends is by re-posting humorous pictures, forwarding trivial things, or linking them to sites on the Internet.... If we fail to give our best personal self and undivided time to those who are truly important to us, one day we will regret it.

And it went on:
"Let us resolve to cherish those we love by spending meaningful time with them, doing things together, and cultivating treasured memories."

She didn't share with me who made these statements.  I'm sure that one or two of you watched General Conference, and hopefully you can share in the comments.  But really... it worries me that instead of sharing information one person at a time, holding a gathering with a group of friends and family to share news, we update our status.  And honestly, that's why I chose to back off of my facebook usage... it's become an easy replacement for spending time with friends and family.  As soon as I realized that I had used the "easy way out," I felt really guilty.  Here I was, doing the very thing that I really didn't want to do.

As a person who puts their thoughts and experiences "out there" on the internet, I can easily get trapped in this situation where I would rather just post a blog post about a popular topic... so now I'm challenging myself to not make these "big general announcements" before I tell key people in my life.  I never realized how big of a challenge this could really be.

How do you feel about facebook?
What method do you usually use for sharing news?