Pros & Cons: Facebook
You asked: “Should I delete my Facebook?”
We answered:
It depends. In my best attempt to present the information in an unbiased manner, I found that it is extremely time consuming. For the sake of time, I will provide you with my stream-of-consciousness, in a sense, about Facebook. Ultimately, the decision is yours.
If you delete Facebook you don’t really delete Facebook.
While it sounds counterintuitive, remember that Facebook owns Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. These four social media apps make up four of the top five most popular social apps. Between them, the corporation has 5.2 billion Monthly Active Users. So, yes, you can delete the Facebook app, but there is a high probability that you are still utilizing a Facebook owned application.
Ask yourself why?
I realize there are important decisions to be made, but it is always helpful to create a pros and cons list before making an important decision.
Pros:
Mental Health:
Forbes recently published an article detailing the mental health side effects of Facebook users. The list includes low self-esteem, jealousy, and depression. I believe the “Keeping Up With The Joneses” effect is truly to blame. This is the social phenomenon where people believe they need something because someone else has it. This tactic is often used in sales. Whenever a sales person claims that everyone is buying it or everyone is doing it, they are trying to appeal to your desire to have what others have. This phenomenon is most relevant on Instagram where friends post pictures of luxurious vacations, a chic outfit of the day (#OOTD), or a boozy brunch with their squad, causeing their followers to envy their lifestyle. Instagram has become a tabloid magazine on steroids. Even if you don’t follow celebrities, you are constantly reminded of the incredible lives people are living — and more importantly, the incredible life that you aren’t living. Oh, and don’t forget, Instagram now puts these posts/people you should follow in your feed, making it impossible not to see what others are doing.
Fake News:
It is no secret Facebook has a problem with fake news. This problem is largely their own doing, as they have tried to create a platform for publications to post. This has turned everyone into content creators. People with no talent or fact-finding abilities or regard for facts, have a platform to post anything they can dream up. Facebook is trying to fix this problem by promoting friends and family member posts, but whether that is enough remains to be seen. By deleting Facebook, you have the ability to take in news from verified organizations directly via their verified website or television channel.
Time savings:
Checking social media is a huge waste of time. If you’re like me, you start your day by checking social media with your morning coffee. Around lunch time you check in again, and again before you leave work/class. When you get home you log on to see what else is going on, and do one final “SM check” before you jump in bed. If you spend ten minutes on social media every time you decide to get on you have spent roughly 50 minutes of a day not doing anything productive. This doesn’t even consider the time we spend finding the right filter, writing the perfect caption, and using all the trending hashtags. According to this study, the average American with five social media accounts spends an average of 1 hour and 40 minutes on social media, constituting 28% of total time they spend on the internet. Ask yourself what you could do with nearly 2 hours of your time back every day.
Financial savings:
As Facebook and its family of apps, has grown, the number of advertisements has sky rocketed. If you’re on Instagram checking your timeline, you will more than likely see an add from an influencer for their tummy flattening tea, the “absolute best way” to whiten your teeth, or an awesome new game to buy and play on your phone. If those advertisements interest you, you may have spent some amount of money that would have been better served going toward your savings or goals.
As compelling as the pros are for deleting the suite of Facebook applications, there are plenty of cons as well.
Cons:
Missing Important events:
I’ll be honest: I have a Facebook, but I never get on it. I don’t have the balls to delete it, but it serves no real purpose. In making this decision, I have nearly missed or been confronted about not RSVP’ing to an event that was posted on Facebook. From a rehearsal dinner to the wedding itself, I have only been told when someone has texted me asking if I was attending.
Birthdays & Phone Numbers:
No one wants to be the person to miss a family member or friend’s birthday, but you run that risk by not having a Facebook. I know about five phone numbers off the top of my head. I don’t need to know phone numbers, because my phone stores them. If I synced my Facebook friends to my contacts I would have hundreds of phone numbers and birthdays right there on my phone that I would not have to remember. In deleting your Facebook, you lose this nice convenience.
FOMO:
Whether you feel the need to know what your favorite lifestyle blogger is wearing today or not, deleting your Facebook apps would almost certainly lead to some form of FOMO. It’s odd, we get depressed looking at other people’s extravagant lives, but if we did not have that we would feel empty, like we were missing some important thing.
Final Thought:
When it comes to being visible in society, Facebook is great. With that said, Facebook offers little else. Imagine an app where you didn’t have to worry about what was fake or real, whether the algorithm was altering which content you saw, or if your post will get a decent number of likes and comments. An app that helped you make decisions, enabling you to lead a full life, by eliminating the anxiety of posting the perfect caption.
This is exactly the world that exists on the Impulse app. You will have the opportunity to obtain feedback from real people, and help those same people make their own decisions. The app is anonymous, so you will not be conflicted about how chic your photo is or if the caption has enough curb appeal to get likes, and that’s because we didn’t create an app for this reason. We created this app to help everyone, no matter your characteristics or background, make better decisions and enjoy a different experience than they did yesterday.
Download Impulse on the app store.
