Where I'm going with social media

Back in January I decided to close down our private Facebook group and stop posting personal content there (Why I'm Stepping Back from Facebook) and that's continued throughout Lent. The idea was never to make this a limited time thing, to end at Easter, but this is a good time to review what I've learned and where we are now - and what we might be doing in future.

Lent is over - happy Easter from these two colourful Eggs!

This blog remains the primary place for me to post things. It has history - going back to before I had the children, this is really what I want to continue building up so the children can read back when they're old enough and get to know me in a whole different way. To see their childhoods through my eyes a little bit, and to relive memories. I want to own these things, both the pictures and the words on the posts, and be in charge of how they are organised and presented, and a blog is just the simplest way to do this. Particularly because it's really not just pictures but often, long pieces of thinking things though in writing as well. So the blog is here to stay.

Facebook will continue to be a place for me to find items on marketplace, get advice in groups, and post things that make me think/smile. But it won't be a place where I share about myself or the children. I have really found a comfortable distance there. The way I see it, if you're here on the blog then you're interested enough and you care enough about us (thank you!) to leave the laziness of the Facebook platform and read. The chasing of likes has never sat well with me either. You could argue that posting the kids' pictures on a blog is no different to posting them on social media, but there is an important distinction there for me: if you're here, you want to be here, you care. It's not just showing up randomly in your newsfeed. Therefore, this blog has very few views - and I'm happy with that! As while it is for you, friends, to keep up with our family life, it is primarily for the kids themselves.

Instagram is useful to me. It's owned by Facebook, so I do exercise caution with it and my account there is private, but it's a good place to connect with other home educating families and in order to do that, I do post pictures of the kids there. Because I control who follows us, this is primarily home edders who don't know us personally, so in that sense my kids are anonymous there: because people there don't follow us as personal friends, but for inspiration / ideas on home ed life. As I do them.

I'm thinking of posting links to this blog on Facebook when I write posts here, though. The content still remains here on this blog, but I know full well how easy it is to lose touch with someone even though you care - out of sight, out of mind in a busy life. It's hard to keep up with friends who aren't easily accessible (i.e. on Facebook), and asking people to go to a separate site just to keep up with us is presumptuous on their time. So I think posting a link to this blog is a good compromise.

I'm not sure this will ever be a "finished" thought, as social media evolves and my own interactions with it do too - the fact is, social media is here to stay and the kids will have to navigate their own way through it when the time comes. I'm not even going to attempt to keep them off it, that ship has sailed. As with many things in life, I'd rather model responsibility in engaging with it than fearfully shunning it wholesale.

That's where we are about it now.