I’ll admit it…I’m a Facebook junkie.

I’m not quite sure how this new addiction got its claws in me, but I think it has something to do with this insatiable desire to engage culture and find holiness in the ordinariness of life.

There are those who decry the outbreak of online social networks as a destructive force in society. We’re replacing face-to-face interaction with virtual snippets. We’re enabling ourselves to retreat from society into a pseudo-reality that requires little in the way of interpersonal authenticity.

Certainly there are dangers associated with this relatively new technology. But there are dangers in all of this adventure we call life. To compartmentalize the dangers of virtual social networking apart from anything else the world can throw at us seems disingenuous to me.

Rather than being a destructive force, I’m finding where Facebook…and to some extent its contemporaries like MySpace, Twitter, etc….offers a whole new range of opportunities to engage people in ways we couldn’t have imagined just a few short years ago.

In some ways, social networking seems like a logical step forward in our coffee shop culture. The art of conversation is not being destroyed, it’s being reinvented. New opportunities are opening to us to engage the culture around us.

I welcome your thoughts on this topic. The conversation is what’s most important.