Is Facebook unchristian?

During an attempt today to find an article in Our Sunday Visitor pertaining to the province I work for, I stumbled upon, "How to steer clear of pitfalls when using Facebook."

Being more or less your average 24-year-old, I remember the days when Facebook was far more exclusive. The days when students with smaller enrollments had to petition TheFacebook.com to take pity on them and add their college to the database so they could keep in touch with friends in a new and exciting way. The days when there were no applications, photo albums or notes; just walls, groups (which were limited to your college network), profile pictures, and pokes (and who really understood those anyway?).

In fact, I even remember the day the student body of St. Bonaventure University was granted access to Facebook. It was the last day of finals for my sophomore year. It was, to say the least, a bit of a distraction in my attempts to study that day. I'm sure by the end of that day I was thrilled to have something like 20 friends.

Today, between high school and college friends, YouthWorks and GreaterWorks peers, community members, youth who came on mission trips, a handful of relatives and all the random people along the way, I now round out at 595 "friends." (I'm thinking I should break the 600 mark soon enough, being in a new city and all.)

Facebook truly can be a time suck. There have been days when I've found myself looking at baby pictures for people I've only spent a week with in my entire life, or looking through countless wedding photos of a classmate I haven't talked to in at least five years. It is a fabulous way to keep up with who's pregnant, engaged, married or some combination of the afore-mentioned. In a lot of ways, its like a tabloid tailored to my life, with all the latest gossip about former classmates instead of celebrities.

But the powers of Facebook are not all pointless and/or evil. Given the places life has lead me, I do believe it would be impossible to foster relationships some people I genuinely enjoy without facebook. I can catch up with people I see only on a limited basis but like to think we would hang out and be real friends if we didn't live all over the country. Closer bonds might get a longer e-mail, or, if I'm feeling adventurous, a phone call. And, I did use Facebook to reconnect with some college and high school friends I'd lost touch with that were living in the same Big Apple as me.

If you're still reading, you might be thinking, "So what does all this rambling about Facebook have to do with the OSV article?" While I recommend reading it; it was interesting — one idea in particular popped out at me: According to Wally Metts, a professor of communications and media at Spring Arbor University in Michigan, "Trying to sustain hundreds of relationships will almost inevitably distract you from sustaining a few meaningful ones." Metts goes on to suggest limiting news feeds to report on only people "you geunuinely care about."

So tonight, that's just what I did. I went through the most recent days of random information about the nearly-600 so-called friends I have and "hid" anyone I haven't talked to since graduating college, as well as anyone I know I'm never going to have a meaningful relationship with. While this might sound a little harsh, I can still keep in touch with all these people should I need to without being constantly clued in on their daily lives. This frees up space to hear more about that handful of relatives, my close high school friends I left behind in Cincinnati, and the people who have really impacted my life in the past year and a half.

I think ultimately its going to prove to be very freeing.