Living Large In Our Little House

I received over 200 greet­ings for my birth­day on Facebook. I know, right? Wow!

Facebook makes it easy to send birth­day greet­ings to those you are con­nected with by remind­ing you each day of a friend’s spe­cial day.

The thing is, the same thing that is mak­ing it easy to send greet­ings via a few clicks of the key­board is also mak­ing it easy not to send greet­ings via the good old fash­ioned tele­phone. I sup­pose, for some peo­ple who are pre­dis­posed to with­draw­ing socially, it is also mak­ing it eas­ier for them to become recluses.

Friends and fam­ily, the ones I main­tain con­tact with in the real world, vs. my con­nec­tions on social media, tra­di­tion­ally would call on my birthday.

One friend would always call and sing “Happy Birthday.” Another would always call me by 8 a.m. on my birth­day, because she knew this was a tra­di­tion that my mother kept and she took up the baton after my mother died.

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Privacy on the Internet has been a big topic in the media this week, as well as on social net­work­ing sites. Especially Facebook, where it seems there’s a new alert in a friend’s feed almost every­day about new ways the social media site is try­ing to make mem­ber infor­ma­tion open to anyone.

I’m a pretty open per­son. As a writer, my name is in the pub­lic domain often and I’ve opened cer­tain facts of our lives up in my book about my brother’s life, “No Immediate Threat: The story of an American Veteran,” as well as open­ing up a good por­tion of our lives here at Living Large. In addi­tion, I’m a free­lance writer whose office is also my home, so cer­tain con­tact infor­ma­tion has to be made pub­lic so clients can find me for jobs.

On my social media sites, I accept friend invi­ta­tions from most peo­ple. However, it’s still dis­con­cert­ing to me that social media sites are seem­ingly doing every­thing they can pos­si­bly do to slip out infor­ma­tion to the gen­eral pub­lic that you think you’re only post­ing for your friends and fans.

Then there comes word of this site, spokeo​.com, which lists an alarm­ingly amount of infor­ma­tion about you, your home, job and salary.

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