Give up Facebook for Lent?

Today's the first day of Lent. For many Christians, it also is the first day they give up something to make a sacrifice in preparation for Easter.

Giving up Facebook for 40 days , as one friend plans to do, seems over the top. I'm sure she'd be shocked to find out how trendy giving up social media networking for Lent is.

Twitter talk about Lent was such a popular topic, it consistently was listed as a hot topic on the search page. Twitter also led me back to Facebook.

alexcrabb: Just talking with E about - Facebook should have a Lent application: see what your friends give up.

Alexcrabb included a link to How to give up Facebook for Lent and keep your friends.

That included mention of a Wall Street Journal article on Lent that referenced a Giving Up Facebook for Lent group. (By the way, there are more then 500 Facebook groups with Lent in the title, including 94 that have the words giving up Facebook for Lent in the title.)

Then, I decided to check my RSS reader. Some folks are giving up and giving: Dave Harte, who is giving up Twitter pledges a donation to a group helping homeless youth for each day he stays off Twitter. He'll double the donation for any day he goes on Twitter.

I regularly give up Facebook, Twitter and other social media when other activities call so dropping social media would not be much of a sacrifice for me.

On the Levite Chronicles, Jon Swanson describes fasting as "giving up unhealthy dependence on stuff." It is part of a post on "Deliberate Silence," a choice the blogger can make in a world filled with noise from family, friends, advertisers and more.

"But at 6:30am on Ash Wednesday, in a quiet house, I can choose to be silent, or not. I can choose to have noise, or not. I can decide to look at the stream of images and words, or not.

I can decide whether there is an unhealthy dependence, or not."

Once I finish that, I started thinking that maybe the sacrifice I should make is giving up making these Internet connections.