Beyond the #DeleteFacebook News Cycle — A Step Towards Meaningfulness

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article entitled #DeleteFacebook→ Let’s Consider it — discussing the recent headlines and momentum around the #DeleteFacebook movement. As more information comes out, many people started to change their relationship status with Facebook to “It’s Complicated.”

As a reminder, Facebook has provided a lot of value over the years. It enabled college students to stay connected with each other either on the same campus or across the country. As it became available to the general public, Facebook empowered us to connect with long lost family members, friends from across the globe, or a random stranger you might meet at 2 AM while waiting in line for food. Everyone was on Facebook! Facebook allowed us to be connected and share each other’s company; online. However, over time, it has been shown that Facebook can create a number of negative side effects.

With the original Facebook, we were one Original Coca-Cola short from all of us joining hands and singing about how we would like to teach the world to sing and buy a stranger a Coke.

We started looking at the number of friends on Facebook as a status symbol. From there, it changed into a way to promote oneself and it became easier to add additional friends as these platforms made suggestions for us. The ease of adding friends online hindered our ability to have meaningful conversations with our connections. We would add someone, view their profile, and then forget about them until they showed up on the News Feed. On the surface, we had a lot of friends, which was great, but it felt weird. Am I really friends with 600 people?

Facebook and other social media services can be awesome tools for self-promotion. With social media outlets, you can quickly disseminate information to others and organize a large group to take action. However, they are not tools to become more involved with people’s lives. Yes, we can express our thoughts and opinions, or share our successes and failures with our online community of friends, but many find it easier to provide a “Like” or leave a short comment rather than have a meaningful conversation. We’ve made it too easy to not engage at meaningful levels. Our interactions have been reduced to an emoticon or a thumbs up. We are constantly on the look-out for “what’s happening.”

The only genuine thumbs up I would accept in my life.

This post isn’t meant to be cynical about how we may use these tools. They have evolved over the years following user trends and then were purposefully built to exploit and reinforce these types of behaviors. The more time on the platform, the more information shared, the more ways (and data) to serve ads, the more valuable the company.

It’s time to be real. It is a fact that we are not great at maintaining relationships over time and distance. Imagine how hard a long-distance romantic relationship is over a distance of 1000+ miles and for more than four years. Now, imagine that there is no romantic element in the relationship. Add time-zone differences, growing responsibilities at work and at home, additional stresses of life, and you have a perfect formula for the Good Intentions but Zero Action syndrome.

The problem is that the tools we have today don’t encourage real engagement, especially with our technology-filled world. We need tools that support real engagement for the people we want in our lives, that can help support us to do better than the thumbs up and keep us on track. We need tools that don’t require huge networks or foster a FOMO lifestyle. This is true of Professional and Personal relationships alike.

Simply put, I have founded Considerit, to be the solution to build and maintain meaningful relationships beyond online social systems.

Considerit is an enabler. We aim to provide more opportunities to stay in touch with the people we care about or want to have in our lives, whether friends, family, or professional relationships, by harnessing technology for what we want, not being dictated by it. Considerit is NOT about generating a mass following, likes, voyeurism, etc. Considerit doesn’t require others to be on the platform to participate. Considerit is simply about you and the people in your life.

I’ve said this before. We need to move beyond the burden of platforms like Facebook that lock us in and encourage us to act in ways that actually distance us from people or incentivize us to portray ourselves as something we are truly not.

Considerit will be there for us. How? Check us out at www.considerit.co, sign up for the private beta and follow me (self-promotion) for when the next post comes out.