It’s official. As of yesterday morning at around this time I have joined the ranks of the deactivated. Shock, horror, gasp. I know…it’s a wild and crazy move to leave Facebook but my dissatisfaction with it has been building for some time and yesterday morning I pulled the pin.
Have I missed it in the last 24 hours? Good question. The answer is…only in the sense that it had become an addictive part of my morning internet routine. Example:
First login to my computer used to go something like this….Read the National News, Read the local news (both through ABC sites), check lolcats (absolutely essential), login to Facebook, click “Most Recent” instead of the annoyingly non-chronological “Top News”, read what happened overnight, a few posts of links, some status updates, oh look someone has posted 200 photos, well I’m not wasting my downloads looking at them all, try to think of something witty for a status update, usually fail, quietly despair at the new layout, logout. Then I would move to twitter which is far more interesting, quick to read and usually very informative about all manner of things – news, world events, where the best coffee is in various cities, how much people love bacon etc. These are all things I am interested in too. Finally I would do a quick zip into youtube, ebay, and my work email, before continuing on with my morning.
Now I am the first to admit I was not the perfect Facebook user. I too annoyed my friends with pictures of lolcats, youtube videos and many many photos….but lately I had lost interest even in doing that. It was soon after I went to see The Social Network. Are these two happenings connected? Maybe, maybe not. It did prompt me to examine exactly what I was getting out of Facebook, as well as what Facebook was getting out of me. I read a few articles about privacy. I spent lots of time fiddling around with my privacy settings, dividing friends into lists, making sure my posts were appropriate, worrying that the privacy settings were a great big FB scam and weren’t actually working, meaning my work colleagues could read how much I disliked my job somedays. I decided in the end then that this wasn’t the ideal platform for me.
Who knows…one day I might return. I’m not ruling it out. But it is long past time for a trial separation.
4 Comments »
I never joined The Facebook mainly because I was worried about my privacy, but also because it's just not a platform that appeals to me. Good luck with going cold turkey, I hope your morning routine is not too disrupted?? I love the Lolcats!!! I hope you are far away from the cyclone????
all going well so far re facebook deactivation.
I am a long way further south from the cyclone. It looks like it's a monster though…very frightening.
For me it's about the mixing of too many groups: Family, old school friends, new friends, people I kind of know and work colleagues. It made me anxious the more people I had on there. I haven't deactivated mine, I've just quarantined it and I'm only very vaguely updating and checking it.
yes you're right…it's all too confusing…things you would share with some you wouldn't necessarily do so with others…so much effort to sift and separate….I may return one day but on very different terms and probably it would be with a new account altogether…