One Year On ; Facebook-Abstinence — I am not missing anything!!!
When I joined Facebook in 2010 on the prompting of friends, whom I presume got tired of writing lengthy emails and just wanted a platform where they could say a quick hello and move on. I must confess that the excitement bug caught up with me as I was suddenly able to link up with long lost old school mates that otherwise without facebook, I’d probably never ever had the opportunity to connect with such friends again. So there is some positiveness to Facebook afterall !!!
Initially, it was very exciting, being able to touch base with old friends and skipping through pages of pictures, mostly to see who was now maybe bald with some extra 100 Kilos or more, especially pictures of old lost loves in order to spy on their current partners just for you to have that extra confirmation of a probable “UNHAPPIER“ lives they are leading and feeling cool and affirmed about your own choices :)
Facebook soon became a member of my family as I started spending more time than I actually had; that meant less time for the family, more time catching up on gossip and most arrant nonesense that eventually didn’t add anything constructive to my every day life situation. I was hooked — because the more friends you added, the more messages you received by email informing you of more posting from friends, scams and everyone else who was on your friends’ friends list of friends, and it became a never ending story.
If you are like me, who have friends scattered all over the globe and it seemed the majority of them, do not have a life outside of Facebook — would post anything even short of going to the loo just to be in the limelight called “one of the 1.4 billion Facebook users of our time” (http://www.jeffbullas.com/2015/04/17/21-awesome-facebook-facts-and-statistics-you-need-to-check-out/ ). Then if you were not on FB, you were considered “not in”
The annoying factor was that I wasn’t smart enough to deactivate certain functions on FB because “these functions were mostly difficult to find” especially if you are like me, a mom of bubbly young children and could only sneak in at night when the kids are in bed. So it meant that I started receiving penetrating prompts for my email via mobile phone sometimes late into the night, when one of my so-called friends was either getting a quick bite at Mcdonald in another part of the globe or had just had a face peel, so then I knew had to do something RADICAL.
When I realized how and what FB is doing with all the personal information naively supplied by me, then I took drastic steps to win back (what was left of my private life). I did the impossible by writing most of my newly found old friends by email and informing them that in the future I was only reachable by email. It has been a year now and guess what — I have only received a couple of emails from these so called “friends” which confirms that you are only interesting in our world today, if people can pry into your life and not necessarily because they enjoy hanging out with you.
I actually stumbled across a piece on the net “11 Reasons You Should Quit Facebook In 2014“http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/30/reasons-quit-facebook_n_4493791.htm. I think it is a good read, but hardly strong reasons we already don’t know ourselves. Facebook I believe can be a great idea if you have a business to promote and you have a lot of time at your disposal. But having said that, who really needs a social platform to make friends when you can easily run into real people in front of your house, at the bus-stop or just anywhere else .
Why won’t we real people stop the likes of Zuckerberg and co. manipulating us all and on top of it smiling home with millions of dollars daily with our own stupidity and craze for some 5 seconds prominence?
