Facebook was a drag and I’ve de-Zuckered my life. It caused merely a wince, much like eyebrow plucking. Why? People that I hadn’t clicked with in real life I was ‘clicking with’ online and that just didn’t seem very clever. Aren’t some things in life destined to be fleeting, like people who show up in your life and then drift out of it entirely naturally? Delicious memories of chance encounters lose their appeal once confronted with photos of ‘him’ on honeymoon. Maybe everyone isn’t supposed to stay connected and watching each others cyber moves. It can’t be the natural order. Someone needs to tell everyone that you simply can’t be friends with every person you’ve ever met. Friendships require investment, moral support, face to face interaction and occasionally presents. Any other kind is a bit of a waste.
I’ll admit to having been mildly concerned about the repercussions of deleting my profile. I did a quick gander at the 260 plus friends I had amassed. There was Roxana from LA who I’d met during the summer on holiday, a not very funny person in daylight and she didn’t get my jokes (a rarity I’ll have you know). Still n’all, we connected on Facebook. If I really wanted to contact Roxana, I could email her though I haven’t once been tempted to since returning home. I guess Roxana isn’t really my friend and I’m not jetting out to the west coast of the US any time soon.
Please copy and paste this status message onto your profile if you’ve ever gazed fondly at a picture of a baby chick. Today is World Baby Chick Appreciation Day. Tell all your friends. Despite these thousands of status updates, baby chicks everywhere will remain completely oblivious to all of this nonsense.
Many of us spend ample time selecting our intellectual material and pride ourselves on the books we read, films we watch and so on. Yet we spend hours involved in dumbed down interaction and reading rubbish on Facebook. Remarks which have just popped into peoples heads are acceptable as status updates, such as running out of teabags and ‘no idea what I’m going to wear tonight.’ We usually try to avoid being this boring and stupid in company so why do we do it on Facebook?
Is it acceptable to be nosy these days? Once a negative character attribute, now we’re all nosy and it’s okay. Hours spent gawping at photo albums. People who I’d been to primary school with, people I’d met at parties, people who I knew I would never meet again… I couldn’t figure out why exactly was I sharing/enforcing my thoughts, photographs and personal life and vice versa.
I wanted to engage with polite and witty types, but it was all quiet from their end, I guessed they were out doing interesting things with interesting people. Instead I made company with bad spellings. Not to mention the person who found out about the cement truck at Dail Eireann a week later and began clogging up news feeds with ‘OMG, Just saw this, did anyone else know this had happened? Guy drives cement truck into Dail Eireann? So f***ing hilarious!’.
Facebook is like standing in a large echoing warehouse filled with people who are shouting ‘Look at me! Look what I’m doing! I’m funny, really! I can’t remember last night! Look at me wearing novelty sunglasses on holidays!’ It reminds me of my early school days when teacher’s skirt got continually tugged every time a little mite had some news to recount.
Some things I’ve learned – real friends aren’t medals on your Facebook profile page. Most of us are far less interesting than we are willing to accept. And while Facebook can be exciting and riveting, usually it’s not.
Frances Macken is a graduate of the National Film School and has worked in the advertising industry and print media for the past number of years. She is a big fan of film production, copywriting and fiction writing. An all-round creative junkie, she is penning her first book and also consulting on an exciting online publishing venture. Currently re-reading The Great Gatsby, she is also engaged to Doug. @francesmacken
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great post! I got rid of (okay, deactivated!) my facebook profile about 6 months ago now, and I feel all the more better for it! Sure, I did use it to keep in touch with old school friends but, since I stopped using it, none of them bothered to get back in touch with me (even though I told them all that I left facebook a year ago – I tried going cold turkey but it didn’t work).
Kinda tells you who your real friends are…!
I left Facebook back in July, I think it was. It wasn’t hard to leave. Facebook was turning my brain to mush and preventing me from getting any kind of work (be it of the creative or day-job variety) done. I accept that most people of my generation love it and need it but it is simply not for me. I would never, ever go back.
So accurately puts into words the countless reasons that I left Facebook last summer.
I started a career break and as I’m trying to work from home I had to ditch all the ‘black holes’ that swallowed my time. While I was never much of a facebooker, having always felt at odds with its voyeuristic traits I was concerned it would become my social outlet in lieu of teabreak chats. So I axed it. I don’t miss it.
Some FF- facebook friends- thought I was really odd to quit, and I felt I had to defend my reasons. A bit like when you quit smoking and all your smoker friends think you’re betraying them. Lots of friends that I’ve seen face to face – and not in cyberspace didn’t notice I was gone off their lenghty friend lists!!
I think I’ll stick with having a few good friends rather than lists of people who, despite the forced intimacy of facebook, cannot really be IN your life.
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I quite like that people put photos up on Facebook. In olden days, they’d hand you the album of their trip to wherever and you’d have to look through them while they watched and make appropriate ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’ sounds. Much better having the option to glance and then move on. Like anything it’s about how you use it – am baffled by the people who can spend hours on it, particularly on the lives and times of people they haven’t seen in years and aren’t likely to see again.
I am going down the same road. I think that Facebook is good as a medium to keep up with bands you like (though Twitter and feeds can do that too). It’s also good if you are part of an active group.
However, you end up building up loads of borderline friends who you don’t really want to delete for fear of hurting their feelings and having to accept friebd requests for various personal political reasons.
I deleted my account and I feel a whole lot better now.
I’m quite happy with my Facebook experience, but that’s because I’ve trimmed my friends list to include only “real friends”, and genuinely interesting people I like to interact with. Oh, and I’ve also blocked all the stupid apps – “Mary wants you to feed her swine in Farmville! Paddy has shot your godfather in Mafia Wars!”.
It’s not for everyone, obviously, but I found that once I spent a bit of time streamlining the options, I have Facebook working nicely for me.
I think another reason it works for me is that I live 100 miles from most of my friends and family, so it’s the easiest way for me to keep in touch with them all, plus see photos of all the social occasions I’ve missed!
You spend “ample time selecting our intellectual material and pride ourselves on the books we read, films we watch and so on. Yet we spend hours involved in dumbed down interaction and reading rubbish on Facebook.”
I don’t. I share said watching/reading material with like minded friends and have fun doing it. Twitter and Facebook are just empty room platforms. Fill those rooms with people you don’t like and have nothing in common with and you’ll get exactly what you’ve subscribed to.
Oh yes. John said it better than I did.
I’ve tried to escape Facebook countless times, but like the crazy internet Black Hole that it is, it sucks me back in. It’s great for keeping in touch with friends who are away, living miles from me and because I have children, posting photos for those people who don’t get to see them in person. My most recent defection came to an end when my first nephew was born and my brother put the photos of him on Facebook – how could I resist not reactivating my account to see his doteyness? I couldn’t.
I can do without the updates, videos and wacky apps though. I might try and kill my account again soon…
Similar to Sinead, I’ve deleted and ‘reactivated’ a number of times. It is utterly moronic but addictive, though on the upside I have got work out of it from time to time (chairing a literary debate on Troubles’ Fiction in Belfast, for instance). I was even asked to write for the Anti-Room originally based on my errrrr f’book input (someone liked my daily neurotic-vomits of updates and asked to meet for a pint). I’ve also had some amount of pleasure redressing old romantic ills – my first ‘serious’ boyfriend in particular and a platterpuss who dumped me for his ex who later dumped him for no-one. It’s been nice to catch up with old faces from my mod teenage days and people I worked with in dreadful magazines. It’s a form of cyber heroin and deactivating is only morphine for a while.
I’ve begun refusing “friends” who ask me to add them when I have never met them and have no idea who they are. My ego doesn’t need their “support” and who’s got time to listen to strangers?
I agree that, managed and trimmed, a FB list can be fun if your friends — as many of mine do — live very far away. I recently reconnected (I am in NY) with a woman I met in Halifax 30 years ago who is now in Vancouver, and will soon be able to see her when I visit there.
I really enjoy the photos, when they are good (and they often are) of people’s holidays and celebrations. Where I live, anyway, people are often so stupidly busy you will miss a great deal of their lives if you only see them face to face, no matter how much that’s your (as it is mine) preference.
Excellent post – sums up exactly how I feel about Facebook – and I’m not even on it! So maybe I shouldn’t really comment further. But I will anyway…
I’m already in touch with everyone in real life that I want to be. If I really wanted to be still in contact with other old school/work mates, I would be! Therefore, the thoughts of them befriending or poking me on Facebook, or whatever they do on there – no thanks. But maybe I’m anti-social like that…
And the Dickensian world of sharing photos via email or Picasa albums works ok for me.
I have a close friend (real life) who loves Facebook, but hates Twitter. I am the opposite. She constantly slags me about tweeting, which I only ever do from home, as it happens. But if we are out walking in a park, for example, she will regularly whip out her iPhone to immediately post up to Facebook the photos she has just taken. Are her followers really hanging on her every photo?!
We are bemusedly resigned to the fact that I’ll never tweet her, she’ll never poke me.
Both are here to stay anyway – millions of Tweeters and Facebookers can’t be wrong – can they??
Is ‘Twitter vs Facebook’ the new ‘do you like Oasis or Blur’…?
Its an inneresting question Claire. I know FB has gazillions more users, but are most Tweeters also FBookers too? I’m sure techy person could provide the stats…
I am anti-facebook. Most, if not all, of my friends have an account. One friend in particular ridicules me for not having one. She has over 250 friends on fb but when she sees one of her fb bff’s in real life, she doesn’t talk to them. I saw it myself just a few weeks ago. But..I guess…it works for her.
I’ll admit, Facebook used to be cool at one point. But it has turned into a stereotypical form of social media. It has its good points, however, I definitely agree with you. I feel like I could be doing something much more productive, like reading good literature, like you said. Or even going for a walk, writing in my journal, or learning how to make a new dinner entree. At this point, I feel like moat things are more productive than FB.
Hello, author here! Thanks a lot for for all of your interesting feedback and experiences. I’m not done banging on about the topic yet so here goes! What’s missing from Facebook for me is quality content and quality communications. Spare me the flu symptoms and baby’s first burp video. My life is generally filled with data clutter and I would rather streamline/seek out the kind of content I want to see. Yes, I could have been more disciplined in adding real friends and befriending organisations I have an interest in. But the more ‘bite-size’ & ‘salesy’ & ‘yoof’ the content became, the more I found it a nuisance. The medium is the message and I just don’t like the medium to be honest. I found that people posted too much inane, self-absorbed stuff on Facebook and not enough thoughtful, generous stuff. There’s no doubt that there are a lot more important things people could be doing than using Facebook. Do we really think ‘liking’ a charitable organisation is enough to make a difference? Do we think that ‘liking’ a friends status update is a worthy token of friendship? The real world, for me, is where people make a real impact. That’s in 3D, people.
Its the control thing that is unhealthy! Trying to ‘keep track’ on people all the time. People should try and maintain an air of mystery in this over-exposed world. I think deleting facebook is the way I’m heading too…
There are plenty of ways to waste time online and strikes me that keeping connections with friends and family is not the worst of them
It works for me as being a lone parent I don’t get to see as many in the flesh world as I’d like. I like everyone I’m friends with on facebook and I like seeing and hearing about the minutae of their lives but then I’ve always liked the idea of lives being made up of the little moments – and the big celebrations. I’ve found things out about them that I’ve never known before as it is a different way of friendship alright. Just wish it wasn’t run by that uber neo liberal zuckerfella but until we all migrate to something better, I’ll stay on it – at least for now.