I am confident the creators of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter had the best intentions when they launched their products. What could be better, right? One central place where you can connect with your current friends, find old ones, maintain more consistent contact with your friends and family – it all sounds great.

And in many ways, social media sites – even for me – serve those positive purposes.

But if they’re so great, why do I hear, almost daily, some complaint about how Facebook or another social media site caused this disruption or that flap between two people or an entire group?

Because when you put people together, it can either be really super or really sucky.

And in a virtual setting, without the ability to detect tone or body language, we lose the chance to pick up on the cues we rely on during face-to-face interaction with others. For instance, those photos someone posted of their kids looking awesome and well-behaved and adorable? Yeah, I bet that represents about 10% of that poster’s life with his or her kids. What they don’t post is the disgusting crap their kids do, or admit online that they sometimes wish they didn’t have kids. Nope, what we see are happy babies in bathtubs (still creeps me out to see those pictures posted online) and 5-year-olds dressed up and waiting at the bus stop for the first day of school. We don’t see the subsequent fight to get the toddler bathers into bed, or the tantrum the kindergartener threw prior to leaving the house.

So we deal with these fallacies online, and because we’re often looking at them from a distance, we have no way to know that those lives they depict aren’t amazing 100% of the time. We’re pretty sure we know the reality, but nowadays it’s like we choose to exist in a faux reality.

I believe we really have little true knowledge of how our friends on social media really are, in real life – how they’re actually doing. It’s so easy to be a virtual cheerleader for a marathon-running friend who lives far away without seeing the actual, physical damage it’s doing to her ankle or her knee. It’s so easy to “like” someone’s family photo or drop a quick, pithy comment and then walk away, feeling like you’ve done your part in being involved in that person’s life for a while.

My real complaint with social media, however, is very personal: it is the purveyor of bad news. It’s the messenger I want to kill even though I know it did nothing wrong. It’s the method through which I get updates about friends, about which those said friends never bothered to call, email, or text me. Updates as significant as having a baby when I didn’t even know they were pregnant. I find this out on Facebook rather than having been part of a trusted circle of friends who got that excited call: “We’re pregnant!”.

So, unlike in the past, when friendships just kinda dissolved and maybe you’d see them around later and kind of nod at each other, or you’d hear tidbits about them from mutual friends, social media puts you in this weird purgatory where even your once-closest friends are technically still your “friends” even though you haven’t spoken in a long time. And one day you get kicked in the gut by making the mistake of looking at your news feed and discovering one of your one-time best friends had a baby. And yep, I didn’t even know she was pregnant, although we are technically “friends” on Facebook.

How all of this has come to pass and become acceptable, I don’t know. I’m sure sociologists are literally having a feeding frenzy over what social media brings to the tables of social dynamics and social theory. (I double majored in sociology, and they do get feeding-frenzied. It’s actually awesome to witness.)

But all of this and more is what this blog is about.

Undoubtedly, if anyone ends up reading this blog at all, I will be told, in no uncertain terms, that I must’ve really messed up with the friends who no longer include me in their major life updates. That I should’ve been a better friend and I wouldn’t be having this discussion, with myself, on this blog. I’ll probably hear that I have paranoia or have obsessive tendencies. Who knows what kind of conclusions readers will draw. I see “You’re just a bitch who can’t deal” or some variation of that sentiment in my near future.

I’ll say this: I’ve been a loyal friend. I moved around a lot as a kid and have managed to maintain friendships over time and distance. I’ve gone out of my way to attend and/or be in weddings that were very far away. I’ve ordered bottle service at a bar 1,500 miles away when I couldn’t attend a friend’s bachelorette party. I haven’t missed a birthday, Christmas, major life event, etc., in almost my entire adult life. I’ve tried. I really have.

But still, I sometimes find myself holding my iPhone on the treadmill and saying to myself, “Seriously? She got engaged? WHEN?” And then feeling terribly nauseous. From the running or from getting Facebooked (which is what I call nasty social media surprises), I’m not sure which.

Honest conversation, honest discovery, about how we all get “Facebooked” is my goal. I hope you chime in.