Wednesday, July 22, 2009

status abuse

Nathan has issues with Facebook status updates. Being a female and mother, the gory details of pregnancy and childrearing don't phase me. If your child sleeps through the night after not sleeping for 6 months, that is status update worthy. Similarly, success in the toilet after 2 years of mess can legitimately be reported.

Here's what really gets to me (in list form):
1. Status updates that tell the world how spiritual you are. eg. Simone is praying now. Simone loves Jesus. (And other more subtle forms) Seems a little like standing on street corners and blowing trumpets.
2. Status updates that tell me what a legend preacher you are. Includes details of your sermon prep and requests for me to be present when you preach.
3. Status updates that tell me to come to stuff at your church. If you have 700 facebook friends from all over the world, don't presume that we all care about the programs you're running at your church. I, for one, don't. Advertise through groups. You may think you're doing ministry online. I think you're spamming me.

1 comment:

  1. The whole 'social networking' thing is about 'spamming'. A whole lot of noise and rarely something worth hearing.

    With (2), I reckon that's a good use of microblogging (though maybe it's more of a twitter than a facebook thing). If I could send out a little message to keep the word of God which a congregation has/will hear together ticking over in their heads, it sounds like a good thing. Of course there will be outsiders (from that congregation) reading the message, but it's worth giving them a bit of (possibly) irrelevant information for the benefit of the intended audience, and who knows, it could even benefit the unintended reader.

    D

    (BTW, your comment box is a bit annoying as you can't use the arrow keys to move around it.)

    ReplyDelete