Wherein Lisa Tries to Justify Her Existence on Blogger

Some time ago (gosh, I think it's been a year and a half now!), I set out to record our son, Kevin's, wedding photos here on AWTY (for posterity, you know!), but we didn't have a secure internet connection at that time, and after painstakingly choosing and setting up a host of photographs and captions, I turned my head in the wrong direction, the static electricity in my kinky hair disturbed the cosmic electrons between my laptop and the interweb --  and ZAP! the whole long post disappeared from the face of the earth. (It's probably all floating somewhere up in hyperspace, along with the lingering strains of Ave Maria: wedding party, Lace Constance, Franziskankirche, lederhosen, schnitzel and all.) Anyway, it was at about this point that I said "hooey" and slowed my blogging down almost to a stop. It was just too frustrating.

In spite of the loopy internet, we never did lose the Facebook feed, though (my husband explained why, but don't ask me what he said...) -- and I've spent a lot of time over there the last couple years. Because I'm at heart a communicator (can't help myself), it's probably been too much time sometimes (grimace) -- but not time necessarily wasted, really.  Because, you see, it's like this: most of my friends, old and new, have FB accounts and it's an easy place to default for basic news, humor, and 'low-responsibility' social interaction. With my house so quiet these days (still another post!) and because I am sometimes pinned down by Lyme's, it serves me well on a human level (because I have a very carefully vetted friends list, for one thing), and as a writer, it's a very quick, fairly high-impact venue for the work I put into it (practically none).

Good, bad, or indifferent, FB (along with Twitter, etc) is the "fast food" of communication: cheap calories without much nutrition most of the time. At times, it's just downright poison -- if you don't manage your friends list well. And I have to justify my time spent just a bit. Done well -- with faithful, upbeat, encouraging, truth-seeking friends -- FB by far beats listening to pop radio or watching CNN or Netflix. When one's vocational obligations are taken care of it can fill some gaps, but  it's far inferior to reading a good book, participating in a sport or hobby, or visiting with a real friend, of course. But, in and of itself, it's not necessarily an evil. My opinion, mind you -- but I've found it to be so. Like any media, it has to be carefully managed.

To get back to my point, though: people don't generally go to FB for deep thoughts. If a post is more than a paragraph long and doesn't have pictures, less than 20% of people stop scrolling to actually read, 60% of folks who share a news headline* haven't even read the article, and when they do, the average time spent on a post is a whopping 37 seconds! I can't find the statistic that shows how many readers seek out blogs without having first been linked by fast food media, but I'm fairly certain it's a very small number -- certainly fewer folks than a decade ago before social media like FB became all the rage.

So, why blog?

I've decided to get back in the saddle because: 

* Mark Zuckerberg doesn't own or influence my blog content. Nothing I post here is subject to liberal bias, social posturing, or fake fact-checking censorship.

* Think about it. Facebook markets user content; bloggers' content does its own marketing. Blogs are

"searchable," in other words, making a blogger "findable." FB doesn't work that way.

* Content has a longer shelf life in a blog. I'm still getting daily hits on articles I wrote ten years ago!

* FB updates average about 60 characters -- which translates down to about 25 words per post -- and allow minimal variability of content, limited to pictures and text or video and text only: no mix and match of pictures, polls, videos, and texts -- very little creativity. Think straight-jacket.

* A blog functions more efficiently as a searchable log -- or time capsule -- than FB, with more detail in chronological order. In a personal blog, the story of a family can be read almost like a book written in first-person present. Talk about nostalgia! I can trace back to when my oldest boys were the ages of
my youngest boys on this blog and prove I don't spoil the youngest two! (Ha!)

* Though blogs may have fewer total eyes on them, the eyes that do take the trouble to follow a link or subscribe to a blog take more time there -- and are generally more interested in complete thoughts, complex sentences, and cerebral connections with other thinking humans.

Not that I'm all that cerebral. Don't get your hopes up! But there is so much to explore on God's good earth, in our beautiful Catholic faith, in the heart of the family, and in my own still-learning 55-year-old head that a 25 word FB post cannot do justice to.* It's worth taking the time to write it all down - and find pictures for illustration (the really fun part)! I miss the days when so many of my blogger friends shared thoughts and time with one another! I'm hoping those days haven't
completely passed. Maybe they haven't!  If you stop by, do please sign the "guestbook" in the combox below to get the ball rolling again. Just say hi and give me a link to your blog if you have one -- or another blog that you enjoy that you'd like to share.  I'd like to spend more quality time on the blog front porch with other Catholic families than drive-by waving on FB.

* Yes, Anna, that is a dangling preposition. Do we need to have this
talk again?