With a sigh of relief, I deactivated my facebook account yesterday. For the past five years I have used facebook first as a way of keeping in touch with old school friends, then as a place to share news and events and finally as somewhere to avoid unless I wanted to be bored silly.
The last week or so, I came to the realisation that I don’t really want, or need, a facebook account. It served its purpose brilliantly for a while and I used to enjoy seeing what all my friends were doing day-to-day. But for the last year it has left a bitter taste in my mouth.
The constant, unannounced and often broken changes, made it unusable. Many of the friends I had back at college don’t use it or have changed so much I couldn’t honestly class them as “friends”, and in a similar vein, I had over 400 “friends” many of which wouldn’t even respond to a wall post asking how they were in favor of an update about how brilliant the latest episode of The Only Way is Essex is.
The only aspect of facebook I will miss, is the events section. My friends run a real mixed bag of events from suspension days, to anime conventions and even girly tea parties. Facebook was a good way of keeping tabs on that and I suspect I will miss out on a few events owing to my departure.
The strangest part of this whole thing was the response to my post telling people I was leaving. On Monday night I put up a status that said was I leaving Facebook and detailed ways in which people could keep in touch. Pretty straight forward – or so I thought! The comments on the status itself were pretty normal – some people were sad I was going, some were joking about coming back, others wondered why I hadn’t left already (they know me so well) etc etc. But the private messages I had were just surreal! People were wondering if I was pissed off with them, demanding to know why I wanted to go, thought I was depressed and cutting myself off from “the world”. It was… a bit sad really.
I am a fan of social networking – twitter is my platform of choice – but there is something seriously wrong when people assume there is something wrong with you if you don’t want to participate. Facebook is not essential. It’s a free website where you can sign up and tell it all your secrets so it can create targeted marketing campaigns and make a metric shit-ton of money. Also, you can send your friends pixel cows and find out which member of the Pussy Cat Dolls you are.
I’m being cynical now, but you get my point. There was a time that social interactions were much more personal. Now it feels like quantity over quality.
This is the page presented to you when you choose to deactivate your account. The ironic thing about this is that I don’t use Facebook to keep in touch with any of the people mentioned. Also, one is my partner, whom I live with.
