Yesterday, after a few weeks of deliberation, I decided that I was going to leave facebook.
Sort of.
A few things surprised me. Firstly, that when I announced as much, I got a lot of positive support. I expected a lot of snide comments like about me committing ‘Facebook suicide’ – the derogatory term for people announcing their departure from Facebook in a loud and self-aggrandising way.
But instead, messages from people tended to read, “Awesome, dude! Wish I could do that!” or similar.
I guess I’d expected that my feelings were, while not unique, probably not very common. Turns out there’s a lot of people who are growing frustrated with Facebook, and with good reason.
I wanted to take a moment to explain just what I mean by ‘leaving Facebook’ and to explain why I’m doing it.
Firstly, I should say that I am not a privacy zealot. I am not opposed to social networking either as a concept or simply that they tend to exist as carefully-controlled private entities. You won’t find just one large ethical reason described here – simply a collection of smaller ones, in no particular order, that helped me come to this decision.
My Use of Facebook
When I first joined Facebook, I didn’t find it to be particularly useful. I joined a while after it was made open to the public, and the idea of an exclusive site where you could show publicly your relationship status, friendship statuses, and share things didn’t seem to be a bad one. Indeed, I even remember the slight rush it gave me when my girlfriend (who joined before me) ‘confirmed’ that we were in a relationship, and I saw, defined clearly, “in a relationship with…” on my info page.
Slowly, over the next few years, more and more people joined. A handful of my friends found reasons to avoid it, but for most of them it didn’t last. They simply had no choice.
Parties started being organised on Facebook as ‘events’. “Who’s up for a movie night this Friday?” or “Who’s up for a trip to Brisbane in a few weeks to check out the Mana Bar?” became things you’d post on Facebook, not something you’d email, text or call someone about.
The people who were not on Facebook slowly became less involved in our social circle. It was not an active “Shun the non-Facebooker!” movement; it was a passive one. Nobody intended to, but our lives became absolutely intertwined with Facebook.
Early on, I would occasionally text or email people about a party at my place if I knew they weren’t on Facebook, or didn’t check it regularly. But this fell by the wayside, and soon we simply stopped seeing those who didn’t join.
In the past few years, my usage of Facebook has changed as my number of ‘friends’ has increased. It’s not that I’ve become more social (though, I suppose I have, but not due in any way to Facebook) but that I started adding people I’d met at parties once or twice. I even found myself adding or being added by people I hadn’t technically met, just based on an interesting conversation on somebody else’s “wall”.
Facebook became less personal.
As people began to use Facebook ‘events’ to advertise their projects, support for slacktivist ‘awareness days’ or simply because wanted people to give them phone numbers which had gone missing along with their previous phone after a drunken accident involving Sydney Harbour… I stopped paying attention.
Eventually, I turned off all event invite notifications, and now I routinely miss legitimate events that people invite me to. There would be a solution to this (unfriend a lot of people I barely know) but it’s not the ones I met at parties that invite me to things – it’s everyone. People simply use Facebook in different ways, and when it doesn’t mesh with the way I use it, it causes a problem.
These days, I tend to use Facebook to post links to my latest film projects, articles or other forms of media I’m involved in. I also post links to articles that interest me, on all sorts of different subjects – from philosophy to atheism to tech journalism or video game criticism.
Naturally, these links don’t appeal to everyone. Only a handful of my friends will care about my work reviewing and critiquing games, and I’m sure a handful find my posting of quotes or articles by atheist philosophers annoying – even offensive, as the occasional de-friend has proven.
This doesn’t bother me. I am who I am, and I post what interests me.
This is how I use Facebook.
