Facebook has come to be a two-edged knife in our world depending on how you use it. I originally learned about Facebook in 2007 when I attended a Divine Comedy event at Brigham Young University. I originally joined Facebook as a joke. At the time, I found it a useful tool to contact and reconnect with people who were significant parts of my past. Over time, I realized that they belonged mostly in my past. Of my 400+ friends, I communicate with maybe 30 on a regular basis, and those people all have my email or phone, and so we don’t need Facebook. Instead, Facebook can be described similarly to Count Rougen’s torture machine in “The Princess Bride”: “I just sucked one year of your life away”. I have probably wasted a year of my life obsessing about, checking into, playing games on, or interfacing with people on Facebook, and it has become detrimental to my health, happiness, and overall prospects.
Content on Facebook has changed drastically during the years I have been a user. At first, Facebook was filled with exchanges of ideas, news, and other things with old friends, new friends, and family members, and I really liked that. Now, my news feed is littered with mostly reposted memes and cartoons, the jejune and ruderal, and the side bars are cluttered with advertisements for things I do not need or want to see. I actually spend a lot of time fact checking this quesquilia because people just repost it without due diligence and investigation, kind of like the media during the Massacre at Boston. It’s not productive for me to try to educate everyone, particularly if they are not interested in doing their own homework. Indeed you might say that the more popular a thing is the less useful or true it is. A thing is not made true or useful by a certain number of “likes”. Also, most of what’s on the internet, including Facebook, is pretty useless which is probably why it’s free. Even when I do talk to folks directly, our interactions begin because we happen to be online or because we’re interacting through a game, and so I end up doing neither what I like nor what I ought but rather filling the time. All of this makes me look like I’m lazy or shallow, because I’m tempted to be constantly there sharing what I ate for dinner or where I’m going. I tried to use it to share ideas and quotes, but I don’t know that this is bearing the fruit I wish it were, and I have other outlets.
As we might expect with a term such as “facebook wall”, the interface on Facebook has become a display case where people show mostly the best and newest of themselves. It has become little more than a Brag book of sorts. Posts about baby births are accompanied by quotes like” I made this”, and other phallic displays (look how hot my wife/gf is, or check out this cool place I visited on vacation). In high school I hated this kind of condescension, and now it’s a competition either for praise or pity depending on the news, and I don’t really feel the need to showcase my activities or share my pains with people I never see or maybe never even met (I addressed the problem with Facebook “friends” previously). People who want to know will talk to you directly. It has been nice for my parents because they can access pictures and updates about family members distal in space and time, but I see my parents regularly, and I stopped posting a lot of my activities because I worried about people knowing when I would not be home.
We post information to Facebook that doesn’t belong there. From sexual preferences to opinions to vacation activities in real time to our home addresses, we make information available that people used to have to steal. In our eagerness to share and be famous or important to just get attention, we tell people everything about us and then wonder why nobody wants to get to know us. Stalker behavior arises where people “facebook stalk” potential dates or employees or associates to determine from our likes and posts and connections whether we are worthy of their time and association. We don’t actually get to know anyone; we look them up online first and judge them before meeting them. Furthermore, there are people I don’t want to be able to find me easily online like former love interests, my boss, and the handful of people who took offense to what I did or said. It’s already easy enough to find you with all the public records that are available free online for the asking.
Mark Zuckerberg is an awful marketer. Facebook is naturally his baby, but he has shown a continued and chronic disregard for the opinions, preferences, and requests of users. Without users, he, like a college without students, has no company. We are his customers, however indirectly, but he continually does what he wants while flipping us the bird. I resisted until they forced all of us to timeline, and the new timeline looks a lot like the old format. I guess old is the new. He focuses on other inchoate things like the liking system and fiddling with the ever present advertising, which is a joke. Facebook clearly doesn't know anything about me. It displays advertisements and page suggestions that could not be more distal from what I find interesting because I am friends with people who like those things. Zuckerberg assumes that because we are friends we share interests and activities when I choose friends on VALUES. Facebook does this, not because it reflects my interests, but because it wants to DIRECT them. Like all advertising campaigns, this exists to drive us all to what Facebook's development team wants us to like/do/buy/etc. When "the man" dances, certainly boys, what else, the user makes Zuckerberg rich. Facebook sends the wrong message: drop out of college, sell people something that makes them popular, and get rich. That’s not success. That’s exploitation.
Like so many other things, Facebook is actively engaged in causes and activities with which I disagree. Rather than continue to use it and let people think I support let alone condone, I choose to take my activities elsewhere. Facebook’s political activities use money in malversation; their new push is to advocate the “immigration bill” which will essentially destroy America as we know it. It rewards people who have committed crimes with the benefits of citizenship and encourages people whose morals and civil behavior are incompatible with Constitutional law to flood into this country and immediately benefit without having to pay any price aside from arriving here. I suppose that’s consistent with the fact that Zuckerberg didn’t work hard to get where he is; he manipulated people in making his Social Network.
Finally, Facebook gets in the way of useful work. I spend time every semester talking with my students about how nature abhors a vacuum and how the universe only does useful work, and then I sit on Facebook and throw away my life. Beyond that, there are now bills before Congress that will require me to disclose my password to my employer. My current employer would actually monitor my activity, and future prospective employers would troll it looking for anything that might indicate I am a liability. Aside from my well known and oft-published aversion to the GOBNet and fascination with the Constitution and morality, there isn’t much to find, but I just assume they couldn’t find it that easily. It was once a crime to log in and pretend to be someone else under their credentials. I guess it’s ok now. You can’t be hurt by things you don’t do, and I have plenty of other overtly opinionated outlets like this blog and my twitter to which they can look without fearing that I’ll while away the hours on Facebook busy doing nothing at all.
In any case, these are my reasons. There are a few good things, but I have calculated that the cost/benefit ratio of continuing to use Facebook for now exceeds the toleration limits I find acceptable. I do spend a lot of time outside doing other things, and even when I get home in the evening I spend very little time on the internet because there isn’t quite frankly that much on the internet that interests me. If I want to talk to those few people I know, I can call or email them, and if I want to get to know someone new, I can invite them the old fashioned way. It worked for thousands of years; it can still work now, and now maybe I can get some work done. I choose to do things that are more likely to contribute to my health, happiness and prospects, realizing that nothing URL can be as useful as something IRL. Brethren, adieu.
2 comments:
I will miss your Facebook presence. But all the things you say are accurate and valid and I need to do some work on myself as far as Facebook goes too.
Thankfully, your blog will keep me connected to you!
I've always enjoyed listening and reading your brain at work.
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