I’m not on Facebook that often. I used to be on it every day while my kids were growing up. But now I don’t think of it that often. I post my wildlife photos on Instagram and they automatically get posted to FB.
Anywho. I was surprised when my daughter texted me and asked why I had posted something about her pug Waffles on FB. I told her I didn’t. She said the post was getting comments including from my sister-in-law, moms from my kids’ grade school that I haven’t talked to since then. It was getting likes, hearts and hugs.
Next I got a phone call from my dad asking what in the heck was going on with Waffles.
“Nothing,” I said. “He turned 10 years old in August.”
My dad explained that he had seen a Facebook post and that Waffles was having emergency surgery.
Somehow this memory from 2021 was showing up in people’s feeds. I looked at my Facebook page and it wasn’t there.
Five years ago, Waffles had eaten a chunk of wood from a planter and it lodged in his small intestine. He had to have emergency surgery but is fine now except for getting older.
When Waffles was a pup.
Are you on Facebook and have you had an old memory pop up that people thought was current and commented on? If so, what was the post about?
How often do you use Facebook compared to years ago?
My kids at the beach with Angus our best dog ever.
My kids are three years apart in age. They had different experiences with social media growing up. I think “My Space” appeared when my son was in junior high and he didn’t have a smart phone. Kids in his class got in trouble for bullying and posting content that wasn’t considered appropriate.
If I remember correctly, my son got his first iphone for high school graduation. Facebook, My Space and whatever else was popular back then wasn’t a significant part of his life.
My daughter on the other hand had friends with iphones as early as third grade. I think we held off until she was 13 or 14.
At the pool, whether it was swim practice or meets, before the advent of smart phones, the kids would all hang out together under pop-up tents and play word games, cards or Catchphrase. The high school kids would play alongside the middle and elementary school-aged kids. I loved that about swim team.
By the time my daughter was in high school, everyone sat like robots on their iphones. There was bullying going on between teammates sitting yards apart. Nobody talked or laughed like they used to.
Now I’m seeing reports from the CDC, prestigious medical centers and doctors that social media is harmful to kids under a certain age. Although most social media sites restrict use to kids under 13 — it’s a well known fact that 10 year-olds are using social media sites.
Here’s an excerpt from an article called Protecting kids from social media’s harms by Stephanie Whiteside:
(NewsNation) – How young is too young for social media?
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is saying 13 years old is too young for social media accounts. Under U.S. law, sites that allow those under 13 to create accounts have to abide by stricter policies around data collection and privacy.
Research has shown social media can be harmful to kids and teens who are still developing their identities, damaging mental health and even impacting brain development.
Legislation is being considered that would ban social media use for those under 16 years old. It’s much like banning the purchase of alcohol and cigarettes to under 18 or 21.
What are your thoughts about legislation and social media? Should it be up to individual parents? Or would it help to make social media against the law for younger than 16?
One month ago I gave up Facebook. I wrote about that HERE.
How has it been?
I haven’t missed it at all. I didn’t delete FB altogether. They have an option where you can take it down, but not delete it. People can’t find my page. I can’t look at what others are doing.
If I decide some day to reinstate my account, I can. But so far, I’m happy without it.
I looked back to October 2020 on my blog. Fall of 2020 we sold our house of 28 years in four hours and had 30 days to find a house in Arizona to move into. I took a break from Facebook then, too and I wrote about it HERE.
When my kids were younger, I loved Facebook. I used to post photos of them all the time. It was my brag page about how amazing and wonderful my kids are. They both got sick of my antics and I was told to never post photos of them without their permission. I am thankful Facebook didn’t exist when the were in elementary school! I would have been truly unbearable.
At first, I used FB for getting in touch with relatives and old friends I hadn’t talked to since high school. I guess when the novelty wore off, it was like “eh, whatever.” I did get back in touch with some old friends and we reunited in person.
Have you given up on social media? What social media do you use?
We drove five and a half hours to a wedding Friday. If it wasn’t for my dear friend’s daughter, I don’t think we would have made the trip after driving nine hours home from vacation the weekend before. But we did it. Yes! I’m tired!
I wore a bright print dress in blue, green and white. When we first walked into the wedding crowd, I spotted a woman wearing the same dress! I waved to her and she walked over and we laughed.
“You know it’s reversible,” she said.
I had never met this person before. She is related to the groom and I am friends with the bride’s family.
We were interrupted by our husbands who informed us it was time to take a seat for the ceremony.
The wedding was lovely. It was held outside near San Diego at Mt. Woodson’s Castle — a stone mansion built in the 1920s that’s now a wedding venue.
After the ceremony, I bolted to the bathroom and flipped my dress inside out. Now I was wearing black with white polkadots!
I saw my new friend and she said “You didn’t have to do that!” I asked my husband to take a picture of us. I wanted to share it with a high school friend who sold me the dress. I thought she’d get a kick out of how the reversible dress came to the rescue.
I posted the picture on Instagram and tagged her. It automatically posted on facebook.
One of my other high school friends commented on my pic in a very suggestive way. It was creepy. It made me want to take the photo down. Then I thought, I rarely use facebook, I’m reading all sorts of negative things about facebook in the news. Let’s be done with it!
That’s why I deactivated my account.
It’s not deleted. I can restart it any time. The only reason why I would do that is for the years and years of photos that are housed there. I may want to download them. Then delete it for good.
Not to get too morbid, but the past two weeks have been hellish. I feel my last week’s posts have focused on death. But it’s what is happening in our lives. I feel raw from the sadness of losing our friend Mark, and then I got a phone call late Friday night from a fellow swim mom. It’s not like her to call me. We haven’t talked much since our daughters graduated college with our swim parenting days behind us.
She started the call by saying, “I have something awful to tell you, but it’s not about Kat or Megan.” Kat and Megan are our daughters who swam together at the University of Utah. It was about one of their former teammates. He committed suicide.
I was getting texts and calls. Everyone was worried about my daughter and how she’d take the news. She was at work, and I asked everyone to talk to her once she got off work. In the end, her coach from Utah made the call and they cried together. Then my daughter went to her brother’s house and sat with his girlfriend. I’m so thankful and grateful to have them so close.
I am devastated for the loss of this young man of 24. He was the type of person everybody wanted to be around. He was tall, good looking, smart, funny. He had a hearty laugh that was contagious. He was so polite and well-mannered that when we went out to dinner with him, he’d stand when I got up to use the bathroom.
I’ve heard from swim moms that his teammates are devastated. Nobody had a clue that life was less than perfect for him. Nobody knew that he was suffering. There weren’t any signs.
I cannot imagine how his family is doing. I enjoyed his parents so much and often sat with them at swim meets beginning in high school through college. His older sister is one of my daughter’s best friends and the three of them spent tons of time together.
I asked my husband, “How much pain are we able to take?”
This makes me worry about the mental health of our youth more than ever. I want to know if social media has made depression and anxiety worse? There’s a difference of three years between my son and daughter. Social media was only MySpace when my son was in middle school and early high school. By the time my daughter was that age, social media was so much more prevalent and popular. Is this a result of growing up on screens?
I had this conversation with my daughter before this tragedy occurred. We were talking about anxiety and depression. She thinks that people her age and younger are much more open to getting treatment. And that they are more open to talking about mental illness. She doesn’t think social media is causing more young people to have depression or anxiety. She thinks the numbers are going up because more kids are getting treatment.
I tend to think it may be a combination of many factors, social media included, and her generation being more open to talk about mental health. I think I’m searching for a reason. Something to blame for the loss of this young man’s life.
What is your opinion? Do you think mental illness in teens and early 20-year-olds is increasing? Or are they more open to discussing it? What do you see as the causes?
Of all the social media platforms, I spend more time on Twitter than others. I rarely use Facebook. I use Instagram occasionally. But I look at Twitter every day. It’s my way of keeping up with current events. By seeing what’s “trending,” I learn about earthquakes, elections and breaking news. I also look up how my sports teams are doing and can find out almost instantly if they are winning.
I follow a few writers and other people I like on Twitter. I never comment or get involved in the many Twitter feed fights. My WordPress shares my blog posts automatically to Twitter and I get a few readers that way. When I wrote for SwimSwam weekly, I’d retweet my stories they tweeted as well as other ones that caught my interest — like my daughter’s college swim team results.
In a short snippet from Investor Business Daily (IBD) on their To The Point page, under the Trends column I read:
Tweeting to the Converted
Most Americans do not use Twitter, and of those who do, a minority of active users produce nearly all the tweets, a new study finds. A quarter of U.S. adults use Twitter, and among users, the most active 25% produced 97% of all tweets, a study from Pew Research Center finds, confirming similar findings in 2019. Among highly active users, most tweets are either retweets (49% of the total) or replies (33%), with original tweets just 14% of all posts…
IBD A2 To The Point, Week of November 22, 2021
I would have added a link, but this newspaper is one of our old-fashioned paper types that lands on our driveway.
My takeaway from the article above is that people who take Twitter as a pulse of the nation shouldn’t. It’s a tiny slice of the pie and most likely doesn’t reflect anything more than the opinion of a very vocal few.
What is your favorite social media platform? Do you use Twitter to follow news, sports or current events or are you hands off?
For my plant-based friends, this post offered a tasty recipe. This is what my tweets from my blog look like.
A bookshelf of my favorite children’s books holds a sign reminding me to live now. Get off social media and into the real world.
In an article from the Wall Street Journal, I learned that some of the addictive aspects of Facebook Instagram and the other social media sites can be fixed. Like eliminating “likes” is an option. You can also stop push notifications for up to eight hours. You can even limit data collection.
How? Read this article called “How to Fix Facebook, Instagram and Social Media? Change the Defaults” byJoanna Stern linked below. It shows screen shots of where to find the defaults and lists a bunch of things parents can do to limit their children’s addictive relationship with social media. Some of these I’m going to do for myself, too. Stern also discusses legislation that’s in the works for social media.
Here’s an excerpt:
Default settings in our social-media apps were designed to benefit companies and their bottom lines. What if regulation pushed them to benefit us?
Quick homework assignment: Open Instagram, tap the head icon at the bottom right, then the three lines in the top right corner, then Settings, then Privacy. (Almost there, I promise!) Tap Posts and switch on “Hide Likes and View Counts.”
A few of you hopefully followed along. Most of you probably ignored me like the airline’s automated call system when I scream, “Representative!”
That’s OK. You’ve proven my point: Most people don’t change the default settings in their social-media apps—or any apps.
I for one haven’t looked at the defaults in any of my apps. I think it’s a worthwhile thing to do unless you want to delete them from your life forever.
What are your thoughts about changing defaults in apps and social media? Is it something you’ve done before? What do you think is most useful for you or your kids?
