For now, at least, that’s my current mindset.
Facebook has gotten too ugly, or at least I can no longer ignore the parts i don’t like, and so I’ve decided it’s time to part ways. The recent security issues have pushed me over the edge but there were other things as well. The sense of feeling like I’m “not in touch” and needed to check to see what everyone else is up to has become more a distraction than a social interaction. The false sense of connection facebook engenders cheapens the notion of friendship and reduces communication to a disjointed stream of announcements. And unless or until I have a reason or need to market myself to a network of “friends,” I don’t feel like being facebook’s “market” of exploitable data.
But for the time being I am keeping my Twitter account. Though tweets have the same feel as facebook status updates the overall effect feels like more of a conversation than a personal billboard exchange. I’ve participated in live conversations on Twitter (and wish I had time to do more of that) with a network of like-minded individuals that I didn’t have to recognize as “friends” or have to worry about private information being shared in the process. On facebook, a comment thread takes days for a handful of people to respond, making it feel like the Pony Express, while Twitter’s real-time narrative actually feels as lively as a conference call. I can dip into areas of interest on Twitter by checking out hash tags as though drifting through a cocktail party and catching bits of conversation. What it loses in personal connection it makes up for in quality and interactivity.
And to be honest, I never much cared for the weather-reporting and navel-gazing aspect of facebook, even while I actively participated in such activities.
It says something that the Library of Congress negotiated to become the depository for the Twitter archive. I don’t know what exactly it says, but it says something that a similar negotiation was not made for facebook – although facebook has managed to catch the attention of Congress, if not its library. Perhaps it has to do with a sense of historical importance, or the idea that there is a value in conversational exchange that isn’t diluted by ridiculous polls, or Mafia Wars, or the idea that “liking” something automatically makes you a demographic for marketers.
The one thing I did like about facebook was the ability to find and reconnect with people from my past who had slipped away for a variety of reasons. This was a double-edged sword, of course, as my 30th (really? sheesh I’m old) high school reunion edged on the horizon and people who wouldn’t have given me the time of day back in high school suddenly wanted to include me on their roster of friends. But the ratio of friends I wanted to reconnect with against those I didn’t was a very lopsided affair.
If you’re reading this then you probably already know how to get hold of me, and there’s always Twitter for the other bits. Heck, if anyone’s interested, I’d be open to something postal. Not necessarily letters – email is best there – but maybe something more creative and personal. Something with some meat to it, rather than this facebook diet of soundbite broadcasting.
So long, facebook.
…yes, the number of people reappearing from high school who didn’t give me a second look was absolutely disturbing. And yet, I love seeing people’s pictures and stuff, but… the annoying, narcissistic, self-absorbed bits outweighed the good, so away it goes.
Simplify, simplify, simplify…
i found myself drifting into that self-absorbed mindset quite a bit, in an effort to stay “current” with the news strand. it is a strange and drunken fear we can give ourselves, this sense of feeling disappeared unless we make our presence known to others.
And when they changed the newsfeed to “most interesting” rather than “most recent,” and made it so that it was difficult both to see a meaningful number of updates and to know what you’d read … well, they essentially gutted what meaning you might have obtained there.
When I was active on FaceHook, I was running something like 5 scripts: one to remove all application posts (F-Ville? Mafia?), one to remove the ads, one to style the site so that it was legible, one to remove “recent activity,” one to remove “jane doe became a friend of joe blogs” or “jane doe likes WWF,” etc.
After stripping out all of the extraneous gibbering, what was left was scanty indeed. Somebody’s doing something with their dog? Somebody else has posted some baby pictures?
Not interaction.
It would be truly interesting to do a textual analysis of those status posts, and any responses. I’m fairly certain that they could be produced by early-generation AI, trained to mimic live people. Tells you something.
Yes Facebook certainly has lost its lustre as of late. As with many of those who joined I actually enjoyed the ability to locate old friends and find out what they had been up to years after we last saw each other. But then as you say, came the barrage of requests from those who never gave me the time of day at school but now expected me to accept them so that they could once again prove how popular they are. As with most people these days the voyeristic impulse was too much for me to resists and so I would accept. The sad side of this is that with so much noise now coming in from those that I’m really not that interested in following it makes it harder to see the people I actually wantd to stay in contact with. And so as many have done before I too shall be quitting Facebook.
well, given that i jumped over a year ago i don’t know if i was ahead of the curve, but i do feel like in the end facebook is going to become this generations AOL – big to start but replaced ultimately by better products down the road and left to the grannies and dial-up users who want another audience for the cat photos.
given the amount of distractions, i think of facebook as more of an anti-social medium.
a final thought all these months later: it was interesting to see how few of my facebook followers actually reached out and wanted to stay connected after i announced i was leaving. 98% of my high school “friends” on facebook disappeared, college friends… i guess the extra effort to exchange email addresses must have been too much.
It’s funny that you should mention better products replacing Facebook as I’ve just seen the videos for Google+. I have to say it looks sleeker and will probably suit the needs of a lot of people who have fallen out with the evil Mr Zuckerman. The fact that there isn’t a wall means that you can keep in contact with those close to you without having to see “x just answered a question about you” every 5 mins.
I have to say that I not surprised about your friends reaction and could guess that the majority of people would experience the same thing.