Over the past week (half a week?), I've seen a lot of tweets and blog posts about how awful this Facebook trend is where you post a status saying you're pregnant - even though you're not - supposedly to raise "awareness" for breast cancer. I was glad to have the heads up to take pregnancy announcements on Facebook with a grain of salt, but wanted more information. How can I tell if a pregnancy announcement is fake? If this is a "thing" there's probably some format to it, right? I want to be able to read someone's pregnancy-related status and know whether to tell them "I'm so happy for you" or un-friend them for being thoughtless and playing a ridiculous game. I read many posts about it and googled several variations of "fake Facebook pregnancy," but couldn't find an actual description anywhere. It's frustrating to read a person's thoughts on why "something" is bad without them fully explaining what the something IS. I realize people assumed everyone already knew, but I didn't and it was shockingly hard to find the information. I've been paranoid someone would announce a real pregnancy and I'd think they were faking.
Finally, Jen linked to Mel's post that contained a description of the format of the statuses. Apparently if someone says they are X weeks along and craving X, its almost certainly fake. THANK YOU.
I realize it's theoretically not necessary to have a detailed description in every post on the subject and its valid to assume a bloggy person already knows about the current "thing," either from a well-known blogger - I'm not sure why I don't have Mel in my feed reader, because I certainly knew about her - or someone else. But I didn't know. And couldn't find it even after looking.
I'm not asking you to start over-explaining everything and writing posts with the assumption your readers live in a cave and need to be educated on what "the internet" is. I don't know. Maybe just keep in mind that if something is a new fad not everyone may have encountered it.
Did you all know about this all along? Am I just the last to know? Are you now wondering if I do, in fact, live under a rock? If my husband, the non-blogger, reads this and tells me HE knew all about this, I'm going to feel pretty stupid.
Don't feel bad - I don't think it's a blogging thing per se. I missed out on the Twitter storm (was offline at the time) but knew about it because one of my Mom's former colleagues with whom I am FB friends sent a blanket explanation to all her female FB friends via message. That seems to be the MO of these sorts of things - send FB messages only to women on your friend list so that *those silly men* don't know. {eyeroll}.
ReplyDeleteI thought it was really dumb (1 week pregnant? Really? So you have your period then?) and completely useless for breast cancer awareness, so did not partake. But oddly - one of my formerly infertile friends did. So odd.
Um, this is news to me too as in your post is the first place I am hearing about this. I don't get it. How exactly does this raise awareness for breast cancer? I find it very, very odd and slightly disconcerting that people would participate in it.
ReplyDeleteYeah, fun times. I never understood what these things had to do with raising awareness for Breast Cancer. I did get the notification to post that, but I didn't do it because i thought it was kinda dumb.
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