Shunning Facebook and Living to Tell About it

A couple of months ago I installed RescueTime (http://www.rescuetime.com). After letting it run for a week it sent me an email with a summary of what I had been up to. My heart sank. I had spent about 15 hours a week actively using Facebook.com. 15 hours! That did not include all the times I would check the iPhone app. I was well-and-truly Facehooked and I decided I had to quit.

Whenever my Dad puts down the morning paper, he asks himself: What have I learnt? I started asking myself the same question after a session of Facebooking and soon realised the answer was: nothing. Facebook openly admits that it allows you to maintain more 'friendships' than should be possible. I used to think that was a good thing. Now I do not.

I also realised that the main reason I logged into Facebook was not to check up on other people, but to check up on myself. Had my status been liked? What photos had I been tagged in? Which events was I invited to? Facebook was not really about others, it was about me. It encouraged me to navel-gaze far too much. At times I felt like it was an anti-social network. Whenever I did look through other peoples’ profiles the emotions were often negative: jealousy, lust, disgust and sometimes horror. These things I want to experience less, not more.

What amazes me most about Facebook is how it has changed the way people think. I have genuinely overheard someone say: ‘Get a sick photo for Facebook!!!’ on a night out - I was that person. I was that idiot. Since leaving Facebook I have caught myself thinking: ‘I wonder how this will look on Facebook?’ - those thoughts are slowly subsiding.

I think Facebook's mission, to get everyone to relentlessly share everything with everyone goes too far. Life is about curating, about choosing, about doing millions of opportunity-cost calculations and picking what you want and rejecting what you do not. Friendships take blood, sweat and tears to maintain. They take time, they take work, they take effort on both sides. They are not easy but that is what makes them so great. For me, finding a group of real friends is about sifting through the thousands of people I meet and clutching onto a precious few who bring out my best side and who will be there when the chips are down. Every hour I sink into browsing the updates of people I do not really care about could be spent having a conversation someone I love. Facebook allowed me to attach meaningless digital tendrils to hundreds people and keep semi-acquaintances on life-support. I used to spend a ridiculous of time scrolling through these acquaintances' status-updates. That had to stop.

I like Twitter for two reasons:

1.) I know it is public - When I used Facebook I could never figure out whether I had checked the right tick-boxes or slid the right sliders or placed the right people into the right lists and so I was always wondering who could see what. At times that could make me paranoid and scared - especially when I was tagged in some annoying photos. With Twitter I know that everything is public and I shape my tweets accordingly. There is no confusion.

2.) It reflects the true asymmetry of human relationships - In the real world some people are ‘liked" or ‘followed’ more than others. When somebody follows me on Twitter who I am not particularly interested in I do not feel compelled to follow them back. With Facebook I felt so worried about rejecting friendship requests that I always accepted.

Another thing that really scared me about Facebook: it had become my address book. It took two weeks' work to get the Skype-names, email-addresses and home-addresses of some of my closest friends and greatest acquaintances - that is awful.

I think socialising through technology is great. Skype, email, SMS and phone-calls all share one commonality: they are, at their core, services that facilitate one-to-one or one-to-few communication. That is how real social interaction happen. They happen two people or just a few more. Somewhere between a pair of people and a body of a thousand, groups form; people coalesce; people choose who they like to spend time with and do so. I like choosing.

Anyway, the biggest thing I have realised since leaving Facebook is this: leaving Facebook was not a big deal.

PS - If you would like to follow me on Twitter I am: http://www.twitter.com/ricburton ;)

A few thoughts that probably buck the trend around here:

‘”I knew all these things about her, but I’d never even talked to her,” said Mr. Balcomb, a pre-med student in Oregon who had some real-life friends in common with the woman. “At that point I thought, maybe this is a little unhealthy.”’

Honestly, why is that unhealthy? I think there's probably more to this story, but it's not like it doesn't happen in real life without facebook. You hang with your friends, you exchange stories about someone you don't know, and then one day you meet them and someone mentions “by the way, this was the person we were talkin about when we said bla bla bla”. Yes, facebook probably makes it easier, but I don't find this to be “unhealthy” in the least.

‘“I wasn’t calling my friends anymore,” said Ashleigh Elser, 24, who is in graduate school in Charlottesville, Va. “I was just seeing their pictures and updates and felt like that was really connecting to them.”’

I've heard this before. Honestly, I think it's because we're in this transition stage where somehow this feels less real than a phone call. I would argue that this is a real connection. These pictures and updates often communicate more than you necessarily would remember to in a phone call. The purpose of a phone call is different, the interactions there are different. It seems like if you're worried that you're not calling your friends anymore… You should start calling your friends again.

I know I feel like I am exposed to more articles and jokes and opinions via facebook than I would if I weren't on it. I interact with people I'm not super-close with, and that's fine. To me, it's like HN, but with a different set of people posting stuff to it, people who are close to my interests in a way completely different from HN. It's more personal in some ways, and I feel more free to be myself in some ways, while I feel more constrained in others. It is, in short, the very definition of a different medium of interaction. I won't say the same things on facebook that I do on HN, and I won't say the same things on either of those that I will with my friends when we're having a drink.

I'm not saying people shouldn't be free to shun facebook at all. But I think there are some common complaints about facebook that simply stem from a strange concept of what it is. Then again, I suppose if you're using it in a way that's harmful to you, and you can't figure out how to make it less harmful, it's probably a good idea to leave it altogether.

By the way, I probably spend at least 15 hours a week using facebook. That fact doesn't particularly bother me. In the past, I've noticed this goes down when I have other stuff to do. Facebook is just something that happens more often when I have more spare time. If I really wanted to do something different with that time, I would (though there's a decent argument here for death by a thousand papercuts—or facebook visits).

For me Facebook has become essential. Using it for hours and hours everyday is a choice though. You can benefit from having a Facebook account while only checking it for a few minutes a day. I use it as an address book, event planner, and messaging system.

I use the FB Messenger app on iOS largely as a replacement for SMS. I check FB.com for details of events I am attending and to receive invitations I wouldn't otherwise (unless they were small events with a few close friends in which case I would receive a phone call). I also sync my Facebook contacts through the iOS app to my phones address book which helps keep my contact info up to date.

Using these functions I get lots of benefit and don't waste a lot of time. I can waste time if I want but that is an active choice and not required to benefit from the service.

I think Facebook is going to start becoming more and more essential. It is becoming much more common that I meet someone new, and rather than exchanging contact details we just ensure we are both on Facebook and connect that way. I don't see this changing anytime soon.

Many of my closest friends adhere to the "A2K" philosophy (Amish 2000) where they try not to use any tech released more recently than 2000. They fail as often as they succeed, but social networking is one area that they have largely succeeded in staying away from. In a stunning revelation (and a large dose of sarcasm), they found you do not need Facebook to remain close with your friends.

I left Facebook a year ago because of THEIR haranguing; if my closest friends refuse to use it then my news feed is just filled to the brim with useless noise from high school (non-)friends and distant cousins.

Don't extrapolate anything from this or try it at home; this is what happens when you go to school for computer science and work at a silicon valley tech company yet every single one of your close friends was an english major in college.

I think my view point is a rarity, but I really don't give a crap about social networking (I did have a FB account until last year). I can't say my life was any better because of it, and as the article points out, it can be a huge time waster. And although I can trust institutions, I don't trust corporations. I'm not saying FB is any worse than any other, but the idea that we're getting something for free is just plain false. They use our data for profit and I choose not to participate for that reason.

I somehow fail to understand why people make quitting facebook a story.

https://www.google.com/search?q=why+i+quit+facebook About 45,000 results

https://www.google.com/search?q=i+deleted+my+facebook About 3,440,000 results

FTA >“I knew all these things about her, but I’d never even talked to her,” said Mr. Balcomb, a pre-med student in Oregon who had some real-life friends in common with the woman. “At that point I thought, maybe this is a little unhealthy.”

I agree with this, but I think it says more about how one USES Facebook. I use it for organizing events and as a digital replacement for a rolodex. If I wasted my time flipping through a rolodex, learning details about people who were only acquaintances, I would consider that unhealthy too.

I quit Facebook 4 months ago. The relationships that are important to me have improved(even long distance ones), my productivity is up and my depression is down (not sure how that works or if it's related).

I encourage you all to give it a try.

I've never really understood the whole Facebook and Social 'thing'. From a business perspective, yes I see a point. I put myself and my clients up on all the major sites to give them a) backlinks and b) a presence there (and done right, some new leads!).

But other than that, I believe one person already mentioned this: "I don't get all these 'I left facebook' articles/posts". I really don't get it.

I'm a geek and a nerd through and through, though everyone I know knows that if I'm online (to chat via AIM or whatnot) then I'm free to 'chat' to. If they have something more serious to talk about, they call or SMS. And most of the time we talk about things IN PERSON. Share pictures, IN PERSON.

Sure I post to FB/TW here and there, but 10/15/20 hours of social media sites and you're not getting anything from it and you think it's 'horrible' and 'evil' and you should do it less? WTF?

I don't get people. Spend 20 hours on social media if that's your thing, god speed. Don't go whining to the rest of us when you find out your wasting your life there.

I just don't get it ... at all. I understand the 'omg I just quit FB, this is how I'm "dealing" without FB' ....

Completely biased rude opinion: I think it's pathetic.

I don't bother with the status updates. I don't look at peoples profiles. I put the bare minimum info on there that I could, I locked down all of the privacy settings. I purposefully made my profile difficult to find.

I friend my friends on Facebook and do very little else with it. The only reason I have an account is so to make it easier for people to include me when they organise events through it.

Works for me.

I quit Facebook recently. Besides the fact that I don't trust Facebook to know everything about me, my main motivation is that I don't think it's about real friendship.

The Facebook mentality is "many friends". But one has limited attention. I'd rather spend my attention developing a few deep friendships than many shallow ones.

The Facebook mentality is "never lose touch". I think losing touch with people is healthy. I'd rather make new in-person friendships than maintain every acquaintance I've ever made.

The Facebook mentality is public communication: my comments to you are public to everyone. I think real communication needs privacy. A one-to-one phone conversation feels completely different than a public wall post.

I love friendships. But I don't think Facebook is about friendship. It's about the monetizable illusion thereof. As someone else has written, it's a hangout spot created by marketers, rigged with microphones and cameras and advertisements.

Friending < befriending.

I've had a facebook account for several years but my overall sentiment toward it has become rather guarded. A young lady with whom I was friends in elementary sent me am unsolicited friend request. She was someone I'd been quite content to never hear from again. So I put my settings as private as I can and remove my profile from google. Then about a month ago, facebook suggests a friend who shares no mutual friends with me, whom I've never mentioned, and who I hadn't even seen in years. How did facebook know I knew this person? So now, I view facebook as a Rolodex. If I need to contact someone, I'll go there, but that's it.

I have never had a facebook account, and likely never will.

The amount of pressure I came under to sign up, at various stages over the last year, from peers is sometimes astonishing. It's like you can't be a real person if your not listed.

My friends and family have stopped nagging me to join now, and people I knew in highschool have mostly stopped asking my sister what happened to me.

I don't use it, although I have an account to appease my other friends' need to 'friend' me. How silly is that sentence?

Strange, recently posted elsewhere on a similar topic. This quitting thing must be catching on and may soon become the in-thing.

This month I completed a year of deactivating my FB account. I have signed into Twitter only thrice in the past three months and don't miss it much. Deleted my Google+ account too a little while back.

What did I learn from all of that? It is that these platforms amplify you. If you are prone to making bad use of your time (which is my chronic problem), these platforms will take it to a different level. If you are making good use of your time, these platforms can help you make use of it better.

I have made the transition from blaming the platform to seeing for myself that I am the problem and I am still working on fixing that.

My response would be something like this:

"Oh my god! I can't believe I just quit Facebook. I can't wait to update my status so that all my friends can see what I just did ... oh, crap... what now?"

Seriously, though?

If FB (or anything else in your life) works for you, do it until it doesn't work. Then change it. No big deal either way.

Meh, a lot of stories about people who make it sound as if it has to be all or nothing. I used FB a lot in the early days like all new sites. Now I take a look around once a week then get back to work; you can too. Keep the valuable contact list but don't waste so much time.

The correction footnote seems eye-opening: Pew Internet and American Life Project estimates 16 percent don't have cellphones.