Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Growling at my NewsFeed

My dog is a chicken. He's scared of loud noises and engines. Even though he's huge, he allows uppity Jack Russell Terriers to boss him around. He's been smacked on the nose by cats on a number of occasions, and responded simply by looking surprised and whimpering. Big and ferocious he is not.

And yet, whenever he hears a noise outside the door of our home, he growls fiercely at it. If the noise startles him, or if it lasts longer than a few seconds, he'll bark at great length, as though to scare it away. My neighbors have been moving today, and all afternoon he's been growling at their voices and footsteps outside the door. This is all despite the fact that he really likes them and, when we encounter them on the sidewalk, he goes straight up to them to have his ears scratched. But when he's inside his own home, he gets all grumpy.

I realized today that I do the same thing.

As a twenty-something person who was in college when Facebook was first created, I'm an avid social media user. I'm on Facebook every day, both for work and to maintain connections with personal friends. I am "friends" (in the loosest possible definition of the term--Facebook friends) with people from high school, college, grad school, different places I've worked...probably every chapter of my life. And usually I enjoy being able to keep up with folks I've known. I like to note the big occurrences in their lives, send a note to them or a prayer up about them every now and then.

But I also spend a lot of time growling at them. Facebook is the home of cute animal pictures, interesting articles, and personal posts, but it's also a place where political vitriol and religious rants flow unchecked. Memes come through my newsfeed that make my blood boil. And then I growl at my laptop, muttering, "How could they believe something that STUPID?! Have they been brainwashed? That's so OFFENSIVE!" Occasionally I will rant about these things to my fiance or my friends, but mostly I just let them simmer; they nag at the edge of my consciousness and cause me to lose faith in humanity. After all, these are mostly people I respect, people I've engaged with, people I can't dismiss that easily.

I usually type out a response, then delete it without posting; I don't want to get into a fight on Facebook. It isn't worth it. So, like Charlie, I growl from behind the doors of my home, but I don't engage.

In the interest of restoring my sanity, though, I'm rethinking that strategy. There's no point to letting my blood pressure tick up because someone I used to talk to ten years ago made an offensive statement or said something with which I vehemently disagree. So, I'm instituting some measures of control.

If someone says something on Facebook that drives me crazy, I think about who the person is and how important they are to my current life. If it's someone I haven't talked to in a while, someone I wasn't all that close to in the first place, I've started unfriending them. Frankly, I haven't been talking to them, and their comments are persuading me that I don't want to start now. Goodbye, person I used to know.

If it's someone I talk to regularly, I try to think about how best to manage. If it's a close friend, I'll send a private message asking about it. If it's a church member or an acquaintance I see regularly, I go into the "friend" settings and make sure that I'm getting only the most important of their posts, in hopes that the offensive posts won't fall into the "most important" category.

But more importantly, I'm trying to think about how I live, and what that communicates to the people around me. Do the people posting the offensive items know where I stand? Have I posted things that might offend them? What example am I setting in my online and offline behavior? And how can I teach, by example, that saying such offensive things is NOT OK, whether it's in face-to-face interactions or in a Facebook post?

I mean, I enjoy a cute animal meme or a theology joke as much as anyone, but some of these posts are getting ridiculous. They require some sort of action. I either need to engage them directly, which I will with some, or I need to ignore them completely, which is the plan for the rest.

Now if only I could teach my dog to do the same...

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