I love facebook! Seeing pictures and reading posts from old friends and acquaintances and getting a glimpse into the lives of distant friends and family I rarely see – its a beautiful thing! I’ve heard some say it provides users a false sense of connectedness, and I partly agree. Still, I get to learn a great deal about people from their posts and pictures, and I would say that I get to learn even more this way than I might learn in an actual conversation before a meeting at work or at a family reunion, with all the social awkwardness involved in wondering, “how will my point be taken?”, “what if I say the wrong thing?”, “what if they laugh at me?”, “I don’t want to start a big fight over this”, all of which tend to limit how much of our meaningful experiences and viewpoints we share. Of course, I’m not suggesting we forgo actual face-to-face dialogue, but I do think there’s a little something extra we gain through social networking. And sure, it’s hard to convey the full meaning of an experience in text. But I’ll put out there that I’ve learned so much more about people’s actual lives, their political values, religious ideas, pet peeves, families, hobbies, and all the things that make them uniquely fascinating people, with much less filter than I would in a casual conversation at a dinner party or in passing at the grocery store. I wonder why that is. Do we perceive the social stigma to be smaller when we type our viewpoints, despite that we do interact with a greater online audience? Does this make it easier to share just a tad more?