Digital Relationships

This might seem like it is obvious already but Facebook does allow you to communicate with real people in virtually real time.  Many people, however, don't realize that it's real consequences to what they post on Facebook and also that real relationships affect online ones.

There's a ton of people on Facebook these days - over 800 million active users.  With the privacy options on Facebook, some might actually think that they have total control over who sees their posts on any given day.  This is simply not the truth.  What happens when you make a "drunken" post on FB where you post a picture of yourself half naked with a ridiculous sombrero on your head or you make some idiotic statement where you are using profanity on a close relative.  You think to yourself the next morning that it's not that bad because you are only set to share your posts and information with a small circle of FB friends.  There's one problem:  your friends have friends and those friends have friends and so on.  Because of the way FB is structured, information is indirectly passed around constantly whether someone in your FB friend circle volunteers it or not.  It's pretty easy to see how a post deemed as harmless can go just about viral.  Assuming they have FB accounts, you are more than likely indirectly connected to your parents, your college professors, your church pastor, and even potential employers.  So that random rant you went on where you called one of your FB friends everything except a child of God, your church pastor might have seen that.  That isn't too say that you should totally censor yourself but you have to post things as though a huge crowd can hear and/or see what you are doing and you have to be comfortable with that.

Then there's the people who think that they can be friends with anyone on Facebook.  If we aren't/weren't friends in the real world, what makes you think I want to be friends online?  I have personally received FB friend requests from people who were mean or ill-willed toward me when I've encountered them and I know of real life friends of mine who have also received such awkward friend requests.  Why in the word would anyone want to be your friend on FB if you are are/were one of the person's worst enemies and there were no attempts made at reconciliation?  The only reason why I see someone would even do this is to pry into the life of someone else by viewing Facebook posts.  They know that they could not just call the person up and say "How has your life been?" so they resort to such methods.  The only other reason I see is that they have a very bad or less impacted memory.  Somehow the memory of them punching you in the throat in high school was lost or from their perspective simply became water under the digital bridge.