Opinion: Your Facebook is your fortune

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I was a reluctant convert to Facebook, and even apostatized for a while after being overwhelmed with bulletins about the quotidian doings of some of my FB friends. But I’m back. Partly it’s because FB is a way to reconnect with friends and relatives (I sniffed out three cousins), but my not-so-ulterior motive is professional.

Having initially been appalled by the use of FB by journalists as a self-promotion device, I’m doing it myself now. The second job-related advantage of FB is as a research resource. I have joined or become a fan of a mind-numbing number of organizations in which I take a journalistic interest. This gives me access to a bevy of bulletin boards about what’s happening at, say, the Heritage Foundation or the liberal American Constitution -- chewy grist for my editorial-writing mill.

On some subjects FB is a more efficient search engine than Google or Bing. Still, the popular presumption that FB is a networking site for the like-minded could induce a casual browser to think that I suffer from MPPD (Multiple Political Personality Disorder).

I belong to both the Darwin-doubting Discovery Institute and the evolutionarily orthodox American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Rifle Association and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. If I’m ever nominated for a Cabinet position, I’ll have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do (as Judge Sonia Sotomayor did, according to Sen. Tom Coburn channeling Ricky Ricardo).

Adding to the confusion would be the fact that some of my memberships are sincere, even if they also serve a professional purpose. I’m working on an article (you heard it here first) about the new trend of high school and college debates conducted on the Internet. But as a former debater myself and sometime debate judge, I still might have joined Toastmasters and the Harvard Parliamentary Debate Class of 2013.

I have yet to discover a dual purpose in some of the other groups I joined, such as ‘Fans of Michael Franks,’ ‘The British Detective Fiction Book Club,’ and ‘Firstborn Kids = Overachievers!’ Hmm, maybe a mystery novel set in Oxford about the murder of every first-born child by a killer obsessed with the song ‘Popsicle Toes.’