I am a lover of blogs. A lover of blogging. Honestly, a lover of social media in general. I am a people person. I love people. I love relationships. I love friends.
But, I find the trouble with blogging (and Facebook) is that while they increase the quantity of relationships you have they tend to decrease the quality. People stop really interacting and choose to just keep up with people by seeing what they were up to. This is totally fun and it can be great to keep up with people who you might not otherwise keep up with. But, we also tend to stop talking as much to the people we otherwise would talk to or seek out because we already know what they are up to. No need to send a birthday card, I said happy birthday on Facebook! And like I said, this is great for people you don't know that well, but I think it is hard on your real friendships.
I have had a few people say things to me like, "I don't need to talk to you! I just read your blog!" And while I get what they were saying, it is hurtful on some level.
All this to say while I think Facebook and blogs are awesome. I also think they are hurting real relationships. And I personally want to make sure I am not relying on Facebook to cultivate the real relationships in my life. I want to make sure I am not reading my friends blogs instead of calling them in real life and asking them how they are doing. Because I think, for me at least, at the end of the day I would rather have a few real relationships that hundreds of "virtual" ones!
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