Leaving Facebook

2012-02-15T11:36:00.000-08:00

As a child, my parents (mostly my mother) forbade me from owning games consoles of any sort. Myself and my sister were permitted to have a computer, for educational purposes.

So, my formative years were not spent playing Spyro the Dragon or MarioKart, but rather on websites playing terrible flash games, reading nonsense and obsessively checking Neopets. For me, the internet has always been a dear friend and whenever it has changed, I've always been at the front of the que.

Being an introverted child, I never saw the point in Social Networking. I rarely posted anything for fear of embarrassing myself and included very few photos.

By the time I got to University, I started to became far more self confident. I developed the ability to have conversations with girls that lasted for more than 2 minutes, I got to know people on a much deeper level, I went out more and I no longer felt like the misfit of the group - the quiet one who would want to talk about evolutionary psychology whilst everyone talked about footy.

This transformation was perhaps aided by my Facebook experiences. I began to find posting funny things was very socially rewarding. Posting funny things gave me instant feedback in the form of 'likes'. By late 2011, I was making one status update per day.

And so, Facebook had become an integral part of my life, almost an integral part of me.

Yesterday, after 4 years of membership, I decided to shut down my account. This is for three reasons.

Firstly, I became aware of the darker side of Facebook. Comments that would have previously only been heard in pubs, around dinner tables or in the lunch room at work can now be found online. If you make a silly comment nowadays, its not just Sally in the lunchroom that hears you, its twenty, thirty, fifty, hell maybe even a hundred people. As I got more and more comfortable with Facebook as a means of communication, I began to use it pretty much as a primary means of communication. It practically replaced my pub banter.

Another disturbing thing is the Facebook 'ticker' which shows every single like, every single comment and every single relationship change unfolding in real time.

Now prepare for an adventurous simile: Pre-ticker, Facebook was like a very long corridor. You could walk up and down the corridor (by scrolling - I know this seems like an unnecessary simile, but there is method in my madness) and as you walked you see into different 'rooms' (conversations) maybe stay in a room for a while. Your friends all wandered along the same corridor, but you could only really catch what they were saying if you stayed inside a room.

The Ticker is like demolishing the corridor and placing all your friends in a large open plan room. The only way of speaking is through a megaphone, being handed around. Everyone hears what everyone says all of the time. A few weeks ago I was having a stupid conversation with some friends, I forgot that it was being conducted through a megaphone rather than inside a private room. Long story short: someone ended up getting offended by what I had said.

I acknowledge what I said was a bit beyond the pail, but if I had said it in the pub rather than through the Facebook megaphone - no-one would have batted an eyelid. This is a danger that i think a great many are unaware of, and its one I'd rather avoid in future.

Secondly, the new timeline feature enables you to scan far back into the internet wastelands to reveal the status updates and comments of yesteryear. Suddenly, it becomes possible to examine every detail of your friend's online lives with a few strokes of the mouse. I'm not too concerned about my friends fishing through my Facebook timeline and laughing at how much of a prat I was in year 12, or that I'll find untold truths about my closest friends by clicking on their timeline. Nay. I'm more concerned about my introverted desire to examine my own friendships.

As a student of History, I'm alarmingly aware of the importance of a good historical record. I'd love to have the Facebook profiles of Thomas Jefferson, Sun Yat Sen or King James VI to analyse, but do I necessarily want my every online action to be there for me to look back.

There is a joy in forgetting, there is a joy in reminiscing that I fear will be lost if everyone can just flick back in their virtual diary to the crude conversations of their youth.

Which bring me to the third reason: Human discourse is being dramatically altered by Facebook.previously I had assumed that this alteration could only be a good thing, but i now think that the mechanism of Facebook makes our communications too direct, I believe there is something to be said for having an awkward conversation face to face.

So, into a brave new world, a world without notifications.

A Thousand Miles Away

Leaving Facebook