Facebook Too Far

We all have that one family, or two, from our home ward that have a little feud going on with someone else in the ward and constantly like to stir up drama. Well, I do. For the sake of this story I will call them the Green family and the Brown family.

The Green family has all girls. The Brown family has all boys. Mama Green was upset that none of her older girls got asked to Mormon prom that spring. Since she already has a standing feud history with the Browns, she decided to blame the Brown boys for not taking initiative in asking girls in their own ward on dates. This she did under the all-seeing eye of social media. Mother Green made a trying-to-be-subtle, passive aggressive, novel-length post (we all know the type) about her frustration without actually naming the Brown family. Instead she used the word "some people" - to which everyone else in the ward knew was code for the Brown family. What ensued was a back and forth Facebook fight through lengthy paragraph posts between the Greens and the Browns, while the rest of the ward pulled out their popcorn and watched the show-down from the comfort of their own home computers.

Kekoa discussed in his blog post how writing through texting is problematic. It can be taken too far, and in the wrong way. I would like to add this to writing through social media. True meaning, tone of voice, and body language are lost. Instead of letting the issue go, or calmly addressing the problem face-to-face like adults, the barrage of Facebook writing heightened the angry and hurt feelings. Words came across as sarcastic and insensitive. While writing your feelings and emotions out can be very healing and therapeutic, it is sometimes best done in private instead of on display on your Facebook status. In this situation, writing was not beneficial and made the problem worse. Discussion would have allowed for more understanding of true feelings instead of the confusion that solely the written word can sometimes lead to.