Facebook Facebook everywhere

Two mourning doves are standing on the top of my patio fence looking remarkably clueless. They want some bird or squirrel to show up and knock seeds out of the birdfeeder and onto the ground. Birdfeeders are too high-tech for mourning doves. They have to eat at ground level.

Sometimes the doves stroll along the fence top showing off their bright coral colored feet. Other times they turn around and around like a dog getting ready to sleep. One coos. The other doesn't. One does silly rotations of his neck. It must be the male because it's the same motion my ex used to do, twisting and popping his neck. One is lacking tail feathers.

My recent excursion into Facebook must look as clueless to insiders of the online social networking phenomenon as the mourning doves look to me. I'm pretty much opposed to the concept of online social networking except in the case of worm composters. Alas, I'm being dragged to Facebook by my newspaper and public radio.

When I tuned in "Weekend Edition Saturday" I was warned, "You ignore Facebook at your own peril," by Andy Carvin, NPR's Social Media Strategist. It sounded like a hokey horoscope from my junior high newspaper, but I had to check it out. The Dallas Morning News op-ed page had columns by Farhad Manjoo and Mark Davis about Facebook, and by Jeffrey Weiss about the online explosion of "25 Random Things About Me" this week.

"Remember when our kids were into instant messaging? Remember how there were so many beeps?," asks my walking buddy. Oh, yes. I couldn't get through a simple set of instructions to a teen son about transportation arrangements and meal provisions without two or three IM interruptions. It all seemed a lot like passing notes in Social Studies class.

When I learned to type the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. When kids learn to keyboard now they begin with emoticons, I'm sorry to say. They will grow old without dreaming of interspecies leapfrog. : - (

IM users and text-messagers devised abbreviations to oversimplify the human experience with LOL, OMG, WTF. The only really useful abbreviation was the one created by kindergarten Danger Baby to describe carpet cleaning with the VQM.

At the urging of a Muse, I started this blog in the summer of 2003, a little before Facebook began. At the time I didn't even know what "blog" meant. Up to that point, I thought the greatest use of the internet was being able to search library catalogs and reserve books in the middle of the night. I'm still not entirely convinced otherwise (ECO).

I have to conclude this post, with further reports from the frontier of Facebook as events warrant. If you have thoughts about mourning doves or moms on Facebook, I'd love for you to comment!

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder