by Rachel Watson

How many friends do you have on Facebook? How many connections do you have on your LinkedIn professional network? Do you Twitter? How many hits does your blogspot generate each day? How many blogs do you follow?

I think it’s safe to say that none of us here at Cornerstone suffer from a lack of e-connection. But how many of us actually truly know all of our 937 Facebook friends? (OK, so I don’t have that many.)

What if instead of flocking to our social networking sites, we all would take the time we spend “tweeting” and “Facestalking” each day and really, truly connect with the ones we care about?

I know, easier said than done.

The lure of Facebook or other “instant update” sites can sometimes be irresistible. I find it incredibly hard to do my homework or catch up with my roommates when I can fritter (ha, or “Twitter”) the hours away looking at Katie’s photos or reading Jared’s latest status update, or browsing the funny flair I want to add to my corkboard.

Amanda Wittenbach, a senior CU and Kuyper collaborative journalism major, said she initially joined Facebook as “a way to keep in contact with people who live far away.” Despite that benefit, Wittenbach agrees there are also dangers.

“It’s good that it’s easy, but substituting that for actual face-to-face contact or even over the phone doesn’t really constitute a relationship,” she said.

That’s for sure. In 2006, before I joined Facebook, I certainly would never have thought I’d be spending as much time on it as I do now. And I even held out for more than a year after I heard about it.

How do I get around it? What can I do to “break the habit”?

“I think it just has to be a personal decision to be intentional with relationships,” said Andrea Abrahamson, a junior majoring in audio production.

“Personally, I like to drink coffee,” she said, “so I make sure I get coffee with friends, instead of just feeling that because I got an update on their status I know what’s happening in their lives.”

Good advice. I could have just waited for my roommate Emma to add pictures of her spring break in Greece instead of asking her about her trip in depth, but that wasn’t acceptable to me. So instead, after break we visited downtown’s new hot spot, Madcap Coffee Co. (which I highly recommend), and invested real “face time” with each other, talking and probing deeper.

I’m not saying Facebook is evil or that I’m going to take a sabbatical, or delete my blogs. But in this moment, I am choosing to place more importance on the sunshine of a friend’s smile and the clasp of a real hug than whatever connectedness my anti-social “social networks” can offer. What about you? I’d be interested to hear YOUR thoughts.