Six benefits of blogging over facebooking

About five years ago, I joined Facebook.  Coincidentally (NOT!), about five years ago I stopped blogging with any real consistency.  Because Facebook is so easy, it’s been hard for me to go back to blogging. Not because I don’t like blogging – I actually love it – but because it seems that I am a damn lazy communicator. 

‘Listen up, Carol,’ I’ve told myself recently. ‘You really should get back to blogging – if for no other reason than that you LIKE it more than you like facebooking.’  And then I proceed to tell myself why:

1. Because you’re making a point, telling a story, or recounting an experience, you have to actually write when you blog. Facebook – at least the way I’ve been doing it -- doesn’t require the ability to write. In terms of expressive language, Facebook is usually more of a grunt to blogging’s strung-together words that form actual sentences.
2. The only people who read your stuff on Facebook are people you deem as “friends.” The people who read stuff on your blog are people who decide you have something interesting to say.  (And then, if they actually like enough of what you have to say, they sometimes they become friends because of it.)
3. Blogging is like journaling.  Facebooking is like texting.  When I’m long gone, my journals will give far more insight into who I was than my texts will.
4. In term of cataloging, it’s a whole lot easier to find a blog entry you wrote three years ago than it is to find a Facebook post you wrote three years ago.  I can hardly find a Facebook post I did three days ago!
5. Blogging is often like going to a foreign country, in terms of the comments and feedback I get, while facebooking is more like going to my high school reunion.  This can be both terrifying and gratifying.
6. Blogging requires me to stop and think, to be mindful, careful, and detail-oriented, and to review more carefully what I’m sending out to the world. Posting to Facebook is much more impulsive for me.  ‘Hey, my cat’s being cute…’  Snap. Navigate. Attach. Post. This is neither bad nor good; it just is.

All of this said, I found myself posting to Facebook a few times today. 

I mean, seriously, am I really going to blog about an unexpected make-up-in-a-store-with-a-delightful-gay-man-who-made-me-feel-great-about-myself experience, which ended in me buying an unprecedented $112 (gasp!) worth of make-up? 

Ya know, now that I think about it, I really should have!

Sigh.  This re-focus might take a while…