Dan had a bit about Facebook up this week, and it coincides exactly with several days of holiday-induced pleading from old college friends and colleagues I love to please, get a frickin’ page up, would you, what is your problem?

I’m not exaggerating when I say it hurts to say no. Anyone who knows me will tell you that friendships to me are like priceless orchids on an untouched Micronesian archipelago, deserving of the greatest respect and nurturing. Facebook can help, no question. (And never mind the slow seeping feeling of Facebook being the party everyone’s being invited to, but you’ve got to babysit your Aunt Fran’s budgie.)

I’ve been trying to put them off gently with the statement that there are people out there I’d rather not hear from on a social-networking site, my students among them, but here’s the rebuttal: that you can set your page to private, that people can only “request” for you to be “friended” (and as an English teacher I love that mangling of a noun, let me tell you).

To me, though, this feels a bit like saying that it really doesn’t matter if the axe murderer has left a note in your mailbox; he didn’t go in your house, did he?

I exaggerate. But it doesn’t matter. Because the real reason I don’t do Facebook is this: I am a storyteller.

Storytellers know that the universe is made of stories, not atoms (Muriel Rukeyser); we see the big themes, the metaphors, the threads of gold; and if all goes well, if we are teachers, we can open up a glimpse of those things for our students.

But storytellers also struggle with being scrupulously honest. The pedestrian truth bores us. The daily routines, the struggles, the dirt and grime and mistakes– it’s easy to try and gloss over those in our stories, or to polish them up, spin ourselves, cast them and ourselves in a different light. Brass does look an awful lot like gold.

Facebook encourages this kind of storytelling, the kind that often crosses over into the territory of just plain lying. Indeed, it thrives on it. Sociologists call it “ego-casting” (don’t just take my word for it). And so, while I know that my friends– and maybe even most people– are most likely of sufficient internal strength to handle such a technological tool, I suspect I am not. I even had to be coerced into blogging.

So sorry, guys. It’s the storyteller’s curse.

I write about this fairly personal take on Facebook primarily because I think it encapsulates well my case of the heebie jeebies about technology in the classroom. I have to wonder, again, about the blind acceptance/encouragement of the use of social media with our kids– especially as our students are, de facto, only beginning to explore who they are.

Seems to me we should be ensuring that they spend their energy on deciding whether they believe in fate, or God, or socialism– whether they work better with their hands or their mathematics– defining their egos for themselves– before allowing things like Facebook to do it for them.

After all, aren’t our kids the most vulnerable storytellers of all?