Pete came upon this column. Most interesting.
Sorry, friends: No more Facebook for me
PAUL SCOTT, Star Tribune
It took me just 28 days to pull the plug on Facebook — to press the button ejecting my virtual self from the wildly popular social-networking site and let the big jet engine filled with my posts, tags, photos and faces crash nosefirst into the mountainside. My disaffection with the information-age solution to our collected sense of loneliness had been building in recent weeks, but there is always the final straw.
For me, it was waking one day to learn that what I thought was an innocuous comment by me, posted on the page of a Friend, had caused him to post a mortifyingly public counterlashing into his little news feed to the world. Or maybe it was just a joke. He’s really a nice guy. And therein lies the problem with our replacement for the town square. No facial signals are available on Facebook.
I won’t bore you with the details, other than to say that this digital opening of a can of whoopass had been transmitted to more than 300 of his Friends, many of whom I shared, even though I had only bothered to collect about 40 in my short tenure. One minute I was getting my daughter some cereal; the next minute my pants were around my ankles before a highly selective crowd of onlookers, all before my second cup of coffee. I am 45. I really didn’t need the aggravation.
My sister-in-law Sheridan says that this is how Facebook throws you under the bus. On Facebook someone can paste onto your virtual doorstep a glamorous picture of themselves, accompanied by you, “looking like you just ate a block of salt.” Or as in my case, someone can say something uncareful and a little bit wing-nutty about you, which all of your shared acquaintances present and past must then use to formulate their assessment of how you turned out. He must be difficult, they think. And my, he sure does look like he eats a lot of soy sauce.
Technically, Facebook doesn’t give you the option of letting the whole thing burn. Exercise your “deactivate account” option, and after it demands a reason why, then makes you type in the Captcha phrase — those curvy words meant to trip up hackers but which probably are designed only teach us what it is like to read haiku after dropping acid — Facebook says you can come back any time you like, because your data is never leaving. It’s like Hotel California.
The complaints about Facebook have been compiled before: the weirdness of getting Friended by a niece or nephew; the banal stream of notices that Joe Rogers is having a hot pretzel with a Leinie’s –mmmmm!; the dangers of casually Friending the girl or guy you used to snog with; the depressing desperation to our arms race to amass Friends. If the acceptable period for wry complaints about Facebook has not yet ended, however, I would like to add one more criticism to the pile.
You’re never going to get together with any of these people for coffee. They’re too busy, and you’re too busy, and the miles are too vast. You probably want to Friend them because you want to rake or shovel or eat alongside them. Instead you have to rake or shovel alongside the cantankerous guy who bought the house next door and who does not give out Halloween candy. Facebook is a great way to reconnect with old friends and family, provided you do so by sending short wisecracks to one another through a digital hole in the fence.
And not to be a downer, but with Facebook about to become our chosen portal through which the marketplace defines and communicates to us as consumers and ultimately citizens, that metaphor could only darken. We could all end up feeling like cellmates passing each other notes through a crack in the prison wall. If we keep retreating to more screen time as an answer to our disconnectedness, and if the civic glue of commerce keeps moving toward organizing us by our virtual networks, Facebook is at risk of becoming little more than a community of the enslaved. And I don’t mean that in a good way.
When you quit Facebook, your face disappears and you become a cipher. Chances are most of my Friends would not notice absence, but surely some would, and it bothered me to think that they might think I booted them off my list.
I wondered how I could tell them I had chosen not to dump them but to say goodbye to all that. I couldn’t use the phone — we had never reached that stage of familiarity. Nor could I tell them the normal way — after running into them in the street. Our connection to each other opened and closed with our laptops. Maybe that means that though we were Friends, we were never really friends. I may have to learn to become friends with the guy next door, even if he doesn’t give out Halloween candy.
Paul Scott is a writer in Rochester.
