Dear Facebook,
I am writing to ask that you stop suggesting I have a baby. It’s true that I’ve been married nearly a year, and though you may think that relationship status, married; gender, female; and birth year, smack in the middle of childbearing range makes for a winning combination for baby advertisements, I’d like to remind you that my husband and I do not require offspring to harvest our Farmville crops.
In most cases, the ads you’ve posted next to my newsfeed are spot on. My current favorite dress is the result of an ad for that hip mail-order clothing boutique you often display. I appreciate reconnecting with friends from high school and college. Without your subtle, square suggestions, I would go on years without even thinking of people who, thanks to you, I can now call friends.
I should also thank you for the integral role you played in those first few electrifying days of my relationship with my now-husband. Because of you, we discovered commonalities like our Texas childhoods and love of beer. You also pointed out a mutual friend, and even though the mutual friend told now-husband that I may or may not be interested in men, it made for interesting first date conversation. Once that was cleared up, we made it official by alerting our Facebook community that we were in a relationship…
Peggy Ornstein recently wrote an article for the New York Times entitled “I Tweet, Therefore I Am.” Check it out (it’s got a beautiful picture with it, too). In it, after recounting a story of tweeting about an intimate moment she was having with her daughter, she asks the question: “How much, I began to wonder, was I shaping my Twitter feed, and how much was Twitter shaping me?”
It’s a good question.
I think we are caught in a vicious cycle. Case and point: a new series over at “Patheos” on the future of Evangelicalism. This particular run of articles and opinions is a part of a larger look at the future of religion, and in the Christian camp they’ve already covered Catholicism and Mainline Protestantism.
The series began yesterday and a new set of essays will be released on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for the next two weeks. Our old buddy Matt Anderson already weighed in on the question, as have other prominent evangelical writers and bloggers like Scot McKnight and our favorite antagonist, Joe Carter. Still to come is insight from Mark Noll, Jim Wallis, Brian McLaren and Rob Moll…
Hoola hoops, Peter Pan, flame wars, the galaxy, and the Sistine Chapel.
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