When I grew up near a rural farming community in Wisconsin in the 1950s and 1960s, people pretty much knew everyone else’s business. That’s one of the charms and challenges of small town living.

And if you didn’t already hear the coming and goings of townsfolk informally, you could read about their social visits, birthday celebrations, graduations and many other activities in our local weekly newspaper, the Manawa Advocate.

I go into all this because of the many times that I am on Facebook and have that déjà vu sense of finding out other people’s business whether I planned to or not. The “ticker tape” that runs down the right hand side of the screen shows what all my Facebook friends are up to at any given point in time.

Granted, I typically have other things to do besides track on that ticker tape. But sometimes I am drawn to it and find myself caught up in the activities of my friends.

Here is a sampling of the goings on from the last few minutes:

  • My friend Richard is going to the kick off meeting for Fire Keepers. Now that got my curiosity going, so I clicked on his event part of his profile to find out that if I want to find about being a Fire Keeper, (and be one of the ‘elders’ who can hold space for community fire councils, grief councils, men’s/women’s councils, etc) that I should please come to this gathering.
  • One of my nieces is listening to “Whispers in the Dark” by Mumford Sons on Spotify – maybe I should check out that song and learn more about Spotify.
  • My friend David just got his absentee ballot in the mail. Gosh, did I just miss the deadline to sign up to get my ballot sent to me? Oops! Guess I will be waiting in a line to vote on Election Day.
  • My friend Andrew thanked everyone for all the wonderful birthday wishes and related how he spent his birthday. Another oops! I haven’t wished him a birthday greetings yet, but there are a couple of hours left in his birthday, so I pop over to his profile and do that.

Truly, I could entertain and even inform myself for a long time by just watching the flow of human activity in that ticker tape.

How do you feel about the ticker tape?

Annoying? Intriguing? Predictable? Helpful?

In many ways, what was old becomes new again every day. Fashions of yesteryear come back into vogue. Home decorations of decades ago become chic again. Even hair styles recycle.

So, for me, what social media does for me is hearken back to those small town days in which whether we wanted to or, we knew other people’s business.

For me the high side of that outweighs the low side.  I believe that one reason that Facebook hit one billion members on September 14 is because people everywhere are yearning to be closer to each other. And cyberspace connections can help to make that happen.

Joyce Feustel, Founder of Boomers’ Social Media Tutor, helps people relatively new to social media to become more effective and comfortable in their use of this medium. Find her at www.boomerssocialmediatutor.com