Why I deactivated my Facebook account
This week I took two fairly significant steps on two of my most-used social networks, Facebook and Twitter, to reduce my participation.
On Facebook, I opted to completely deactivate my account. Several of my friends have tried this before and failed, so who really knows how long this will last for me. As one of my friends said, “There have been more determined people than you who tried and failed.”
I won’t deny that Facebook can offer you value in several ways. It’s a great one-stop site that has all your friends in one place. It’s easy to see their photos (as it’s the largest photo-sharing Web site in the world), organize events, get phone numbers, share links, etc.
But Facebook has social consequences, too. I won’t go into elaborate detail on this, as plenty more people have detailed this before, but there reaches a point where your social circles overlap then collapse upon each other on Facebook. You have people you would really consider your “true friends” that you want to share everything with. Then there are coworkers and former coworkers. Then there’s acquaintances, friends of friends, Internet “friends,” former schoolmates from gradeschool and classmates from college. And then there’s family.
To get something of value out of Facebook, you have to share. But the nature of human relationships dictates that we don’t want to share equally with everyone, and vice versa. This forces you to do one of several things: overshare to everyone, share nothing universally or micromanage your sharing by grouping your “friends” into Facebook friend lists.
It’d be easy to say that Facebook is a vortex for wasting time, but I think there’s also some mental stress associated with it, too. You’re forced to spend a certain percentage of your time doing mind exercises about what goes where to share with whom.
Certainly, some people receive entertainment (or other) value from Facebook that makes using it worth it for them. But for others who do the cost-benefit analysis of Facebook, it can fall short.
I found that I only really appreciated the shared items (now renamed “Links”) from one person. But these shared links can be imported to an RSS reader and once I did that, I found no reason to keep using Facebook.
For me, the overwhelming reason to use social networks is to share and discover new things or ideas. Facebook is built upon the idea that the main content being shared and discovered revolves around personal media, which I’m going to coin as the term “metalocal.”
But when you consider how much value this actually has and whether it’s something worth spending your time sifting through the noise to find better signal, I think there reaches a point where you can say, “I’m not missing anything if I’m not here.”
How long will this last? Again, I’m not sure. But I like the idea of deactivation and seeing where I shift my time and attention to.
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