In this inaugural post, I want to talk a moment about my recent decision to leave social media – and Facebook in particular. If anyone reads this blog, the first will probably be folks from my Facebook page in the days before it is finally closed (Friday, May 19, 2017). I did not want to engage with the subject on Facebook itself, and anyone who cares will be here.
My decision to leave social media has to do primarily with time, privacy, and focus. It has been 10 years since I first joined Facebook, and about 12 years since I first joined MySpace. I have been on social media for almost half of my life, and in the years since I began college it grew into an ever larger part of my daily routine. In January, I purged my ancillary social media profiles – Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter – with the ultimate aim to remove Facebook. Facebook, however, has become a part of digital infrastructure. In an ideal world Facebook would be the town square of the internet. I do not think that is what it is.
The biggest driver of my decision is purely personal – I just want my time back. For much of the past year I have been thinking over the idea of intentional living – filling my life with things which I intentionally am trying to cultivate, rather than just take the world in as it comes. Many hours – likely weeks – of my life have been taken up passively haunting news feeds and dashboards, and it has left me feeling more disconnected from friends and family than any time before I used social media heavily. It invades my work, it invades my practice, and it keeps me from listening, watching, reading, talking, or enjoying in entirety.
With discipline, these are things I could manage and balance on my own. There are many out there who can both use social media and set it aside when needed. I know myself, I know my limitations, and I know from years of experience that is not how I do business.
There are other considerations, too.
Social media leads me to spend more money on things I don’t really need, it throws advertising at my face constantly. My favorite restaurants post specials, I go out to eat them. Clickbait, “Tastey” videos, 4G data consumption, draining battery life, photo memes of dubious accuracy, bogus news, commodified opinion…all filling my feed rather than what I really am on Facebook for – people. Social media companies – justifiably – also spend a significant amount of money researching ways to lock people sociologically into their services. Our reliance on these services are not merely because they are useful – it’s also because social science is used to get us to want more.
Social media tracks my activities online, this is especially true of Facebook. I am fully aware that Facebook creates shadow profiles for non-users so it may track and sell data to advertisers. I am aware that because I used Facebook for 10 years, that they have more than enough information to continue to sell to advertisers for years to come. I am also aware that because I have friends who are still using Facebook, any data in reference to me uploaded from here on out will be placed in what amounts to a dossier Facebook holds on me in a server. This is behavior I do not like, and even if I can’t avoid it, I at least will not be willingly party to it.
In our digital age, it is essentially impossible to avoid being tracked, and even harder to not have targeted advertising focused on you. However, I want to have a bit more control over what it is social media corporations get out of me. I will use services which I believe provide a net benefit to me, such as YouTube.
Social media for me is just the beginning of placing controls on what digital technology I have around, and to what extent it figures into my life. Convenience is no longer a chief consideration for me. To me it is a matter of personal freedom, both from my worst impulse to my personal life becoming open to the world’s largest corporations.
There are many reasons to keep using Facebook; it does provide useful services. I just do not find those services to be particularly useful to me personally at this time. For myself, I do not believe the costs justify the benefits. For each person, that calculus will be different.
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