I have been sharing a lot of short communications with only a few people. By current standards on social media sites, I am a veritable hermit. I have, by design, only a few family members and a very select few close friends as Facebook "friends." Limiting my "friends" allows me to (a) keep my personal life reasonably personal and (b) keeps the number of postings showing up daily on my Facebook page to an easily readable number.
Facebook has served a purpose in that it keeps me up to date on what is happening with my family and some of my close friends, and perhaps they have some interest in the going-ons in my own life. What it does NOT do is serve as a place for me to sort my thoughts on a topic by writing a short essay, nor does it allow my friends and family to, at their convenience, read something from me that is longer than a Facebook posting, such as a book review or a travelogue from a trip I might have recently taken.
The other problem is that facebook is not really the best way to communicate, in the classical sense of the term, with other people. I know that many of my facebook postings are lost in the "noise" of the site. If someone with a lot of "friends" goes for several hours without reading his/her post, they will likely never scroll all the way to the oldest post since their last online check.
Don't get wrong, I am not going to cut off all my ties to facebook . . . I really enjoy having a window into the lives of my family and friends . . . but I am going to return to some serious blog posting, starting with a review of two books about economic theory: How Much is Enough; Money and the Good Life by Robert and Edward Skidelsky, and The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek. These were not easy books to read, and are going to be a challenge to summarize, contrast, and compare.
When I was 18, I knew all the answers.
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