Against Facebook

This was originally a Facebook note. I posted it to explain why I was cutting back from 400+ friends to about a tenth that many.

---

1. My take on communication technology is that balance is everything, and for most folks, there’s a tech-facilitated path that they won’t have an easy time keeping balanced. I see mothers yack on cellphones while ignoring their infants, I see teens who text obsessively and can’t pay attention to their professors or to traffic, and I see my own struggles keeping Facebook in healthy balance. I tend to hover over it and throw unhealthy amounts of the day into it. That’s been behind my decision to shut it down when school is in session for the past few terms. The problem is, that hovering isn’t any healthier during the summer; I need to be productive during the summer, and even when it’s time to relax, I don’t relax very successfully when I’m Facebook-tethered. I’ve never been a smoker, drug-taker or heavy drinker, but the Facebook dopamine squirt gives me trouble, and I’m convinced that the healthiest way to reach balance is to muscle my way to it with no half measures.
2. I take seriously the privacy concerns people are reporting, and I’m very sure we haven’t seen the whole picture. Facebook is not providing all its geegaws as a public service; they are in this to make money, and they are continually working behind the scenes to make it more profitable than it is. Today’s Facebook is effectively already yesterday’s Facebook. While the loss of privacy might seem to be a latent threat, it disturbs me that if it were an active threat and I was at risk, I would have no way of knowing it. I keep my privacy settings fairly tight, but more and more I feel like someone driving on a busy highway who gives the road no more than half their attention; it’s not enough, and I need to drive a lot more defensively.
3. Finally, I’m more or less sure Facebook has passed its peak. More and more people use it less and less, and the bulk of material that’s even marginally interesting comes from a handful of my four-hundred-plus friends. For a while, I thought that was seasonal, but I’m growing more sure it isn’t. What was once pretty robust and enjoyable has become thin gruel, so it’s a good time to cut way back before my expectations are dashed any further.

There are little reasons, little annoyances, that add an ounce or two of pressure on top of the above, but those three are the major driving forces. Because of them, I’ve arrived at a tentative plan to go on a mass un-friending, and cut back only to people in three categories:

• Family
  
• Graduates from my department
  
• A handful of people who were hard to find, and I don’t want to lose again.

Before I do that, I’ll collect a lot of email addresses of other people, just so I have a way to contact them. But it’s time to become one of the low-activity Facebook users and move to using it for a purpose, not just for the sake of using it.