Why You Should Remove Facebook From Your Mobile Device
tl;dr — Life is better when you only pay attention to people you really care about or have a real interest in, and algorithms don’t get in the way of your time.
In 2011 I deleted my Facebook account entirely. I was intrigued by the new Google+ and the ever-changing privacy features in Facebook lead me to grow weary. I was learning that if the product is free, well then: you are the product.
I had over 600 friends at the time. Wait. Six-hundred? Who were all these people and how did I get so many? Many were from business school, many from the TEDx community in which I took an active part, and others still were people I met, sometimes rarely, along the path of my life. The problem was I didn’t really know most of them, and by that I mean some I had never met face-to-face, nor did I ever speak with.
After deleting my Facebook account, I couldn’t have felt freer. Sure, there was a little bit of FOMO: Fear of Missing Out, but that subsided eventually. However, thanks to a couple of groups I became a part of, I was forced back into using Facebook since these groups used it as their primary vehicle for inter-group communication.
*sigh*
I was going to be far more curatorial this time around.
With the proliferation of social media into our lives, I found myself continuously distracted with notifications from Facebook. I would login, no, actually who needs to even login when it’s an app on your phone? It’s just as easy as opening the app and there you are. The surveillant nature of Facebook was there to record every action you take.
Here’s the thing, it hacks our psychology. It’s not just the notifications, either. We want to know what’s going on (FOMO) and we have this drive to seek validation (narcissism):
“Did someone like or comment on something I posted? I MUST KNOW NOW!”
Social network Path may have been onto something by limiting engagement to only your closest friends, those who you have meaningful connections with. However, a limited network does not hold the value of the network effect, which states that the larger the network becomes, the more value it provides.
When you limit your network, do you limit its value?
I was once informed by a smart manager: If everything is a priority, nothing is. And it’s true. I’m curious if a similar thought process applies here: When everyone is connected, is anyone connected? I mean really connected?
Further, your Facebook feed is curated by Facebook’s algorithms. There even have even been some distasteful and morally gray experiments done using this newsfeed.
Why let Facebook tell you what you should see?
I found my feed full of news articles I may or may not find interesting, a friend “liked” the post of someone I don’t even know so that shows up in my feed, advertisements I have little interest in. It’s been documented that by limiting what we see, we can miss out on alternative viewpoints, which can be important for critical thought and discussion.
Can an algorithm really know me? What should I do instead?
I use Twitter, and am admittedly a bit of a Twit-a-holic, but that feed is like a firehose anyway, so I create lists. There’s talk that Twitter will go the way of Facebook by algorithmically limiting their feeds and I think that’s a bad idea. So do others.
In the summer of 2014 I removed Facebook from my phone… And it’s been awesome.
I have no app to monitor my Facebook activity. Yes, I could login via the web-browser, but I choose not to. I resist the urge to immediately post a photo about something or to make a statement about what I’m doing, thinking or who I am with. Because of this limitation, I feel like the quality of those moments have increased. I enjoy them more.
It reminds me of the study by the NYC restaurant about how mobile phones are ruining their servers ability to deliver a quality service.
Instagram remains on my phone and has a self-imposed limit to follow no more than 100 people (right now I’m at 66, and I’m happy with that). What about Instagram is preferable? My Instagram feed only contains people I care about or find interesting. Nothing else. No “likes” of other posts, no ads, no other inserted items into the feed (and hopefully that won’t change), only photos with a short caption, and maybe a location.
The result? I find myself looking at my phone less and paying more attention to the people and happenings around me, because if there’s anything I may be missing out on, it’s the life occurring in whatever place I happen to be at that moment.
I want to spend less time with my phone, and more time with the people who are important to me.
Go ahead. Remove that Facebook app. I dare you.
