Leaving Facebook
“Don’t hate on me because I’m not on The Social Network!” my friend Mary yelled between fits of laughter. “If you really want to tell me something, you can just shoot me a text.” We had been teasing her about the absurdity of her being our club’s “Social Chair” and not having a Facebook account. Mary had spent the better part of the evening defending her choice to leave.
I remember signing up for The Social Network, as Mary loves to call it, back in middle school. The possibilities seemed endless. Music videos that would make the rounds on people’s walls would become topics of conversation the next day. We could put up pictures of parties we threw, concerts we were lucky to attend, and days at the beach with friends. Best of all, we could write on each other’s walls and ‘poke’ people we wanted to talk to.
Writing on people’s walls used to be incredibly simple and socially intuitive. If you wanted to show your friend a website for everyone to see, you posted it on their wall. If you wanted to get someone’s attention, all you had to do was ‘poke’ them to get their attention. If you wanted to send them a message, you did that on Facebook. These actions seemed obvious and intuitive, as they closely mirrored (as close as wall posting can) actions we would perform in real life.
As we grew up with Facebook, these actions and verbs took on new, well-understood meanings: we posted things on each other’s ‘Walls,’ started ‘poke wars,’ and ‘liked’ photos. Gradually changes to Facebook were made that, while angering the general population, would snake their way into our daily lives and tweaked how we used Facebook as a communication platform. However, like an old friend, somewhere along the way we grew apart.
Eventually Facebook decided to put on a more ‘serious’ mask in an attempt to appeal to a broader demographic. It became more about explicit content sharing and elegant ways to digest the incredibly large amount of content that your friends were posting. Eventually ‘Pokes’ were moved into a tiny drop down menu and the wall post form became incredibly more elaborate. More frighteningly, Facebook started to focus on chronology with its introduction of the Timeline.
With a stronger emphasis on ‘who did what, when’ instead of ‘what is happening now with your friends,’ the original purpose of Facebook as a communication tool became diluted. This ‘New Facebook’, as it was frequently dubbed, became an excellent tool for checking up on what your friends were doing and to show off your accomplishments.
This, Cliff Watson believes, is one of the strongest deterrents of staying on Facebook for teens. This kind of environment is no longer focusing on communication, but comparing your life to others:
What is Facebook to most people over the age of 25? It’s a never-ending class reunion mixed with an eternal late-night dorm room gossip session mixed with a nightly check-in on what coworkers are doing after leaving the office. In other words, it’s a place where you go to keep tabs on your friends and acquaintances.
You know what kids call that? School.
For those of us out of school, Facebook is a place to see the accomplishments of our friends and acquaintances we’ve made over years and decades. We watch their lives: babies, job promotions, vacations, relationships, break-ups, new hair colors, ad nauseum.
For kids who still go to school, Facebook is boring. If one of their friends does something amazing or amazingly dumb, they’ll find out within five minutes. If they’re not friends with that person, it will take 15 minutes.
Eventually we sought out and attempted to adopt new ways of communicating and sharing, clinging to some platforms (like Twitter) but ultimately abandoning most. At that point the original platform adoption problem of “all of my friends are not on here” began to weigh heavily on our decision to stick with a single network.
Facebook, therefore, held its ground. As our demographic grew up, Facebook was turned on it’s head and started to be used for more nefarious purposes like stalking and keeping tabs on people. Digging up every piece of information on an ex’s new beau was applauded as an aggressive move, as opposed to an indicator of obsessive behavior. Meeting somebody new? Look them up on Facebook and know everything about them before they’ve said a word. The most troubling part was that these activities were widely accepted as a new norm.
A conversation with a college friend of mine was just the start of a negative use trend I noticed among my peers:
I’ve been checking up on all of the kids that graduated high school with me. Basically I want to ‘win’ high school. The way you do that is to get the hottest girlfriend and the best job by the time your ten-year graduation anniversary rolls around. When I started dating [redacted] I was like: “Yes! ‘Hot girlfriend,’ down,” but then I saw that another kid started working at [redacted] and then I was sad.
The most incredible part of that conversation, besides the idea of ‘winning’ high school, was that this friend continued to use Facebook as if they did not hear their own words. It should seem bizarre that an individual who is completely cognizant of the unsavory behavior that the platform encourages and the questionable value it brings, would continue to use said platform.
More recently, a brief exchange with a co-worker brought the question of Facebook’s value to the forefront:
I realized that everything I was doing on Facebook was completely non-constructive. I was mostly using it to stalk old high school friends, ex-girlfriends, girls I was interested in, and people who I was going to meet.
It got to the point where I would look up everything I could about a person hours before I would meet them, and I would have already formed an opinion of them before they had even said a word. I wasn’t actually listening to people.
That exchange haunted my day-to-day thoughts. It came to mind every time I visited the website or took a few minutes of downtime to skim over my Feed. It made me wonder exactly what I was doing with the app in the first place. Was this really how I wanted to interact with and know my friends? Were they really friends to begin with?
The more I consumed the endless Feed, the more anxiety and regret piled up in my mind and in my chest. Long-lost loves finding new arbiters for their hearts, old friends hanging out with new comrades, all useless sequels to books I had finished and closed. Once again, I was being dragged mentally and spiritually into a past that I had left; reliving all of the highs and lows dozens of times a minute. Even worse, I’d begin to extrapolate and try to read into every little detail and try to predict futures that had absolutely nothing to do with me.
The experience was exhausting and useless, so I fixed that: I deleted the iOS app, I deactivated my account, and I blocked the facebook.com domain.
Epilogue
It has only been a month and I’m not sure how I feel. I imagine it will take some time for the withdrawal symptoms to surface but for now I’m hoping the mental noise will simmer down.
On the other hand, I have been texting and talking with people more. Coordinating events becomes a little harder but calendar events and GroupMe manage to alleviate most of the hurdles. Overall, there is more communication and I’m excited to see how this pans out.
Email me when artem titoulenko publishes or recommends stories