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I would respectfully disagree with this comment.

I have heard this argument made many times before but the fact is you just had to work harder to have a "social life" before facebook. That is what made relationships feel more meaningful back in the presocial network days, because they where more meaningful (and you had less of them).

Commenting on a photo of your friend's newborn is not equal to paying a visit to hold the baby while the mother takes a long bath and the father drinks a much needed beer. And in the end that comment will be about as memorable as the effort put into it.

Back in the late 90s, nobody had 200 friends. People had small groups of tight-nit friends with whom they shared REAL experiences. One did not need a host of software applications to tell you what their friends where up to because they where there with them when it happened.

Here is the test I apply... if I'm not willing to take the time to call someone up and invite them over for a beer, perhaps they are not really friends so much as an entity relationship in some corporations database.

Personally, I log into my facebook account about once every 4 months just to see what I'm missing. Let me tell you, I'm not missing much.

Pretty much. I quit Facebook for good in February. My social life has gotten simpler, but only in the sense that I am now hanging out only with people I actually care about, vs those I was simply pretending to care about.

I still remember what it felt like during the first week or so of not having Facebook. It felt like someone just turned off the loud and annoying TV in the room, an I suddenly found that I was able to have real conversations with people.

This is difficult to maintain for shared group experiences though. For example, I went on a group trip in 2004 to Europe with a group of strangers. I became friends with a few and interacted with many. Sure I could keep in touch via email or phone with the few, but what we really value about those 10 days was the shared group experience. A 20 person conference call seems much less viable than a Facebook group with the occasional reminiscing post. This starts with a friend request.

Of course this escalates quite quickly. Shared experiences as classmates or part of a student organization or even a workplace. We used to only have the option of maintaining individual relationships. Now that we have the option of maintaining group relationships, the definition of "friend" is fuzzy.

Well, I dunno. I had 200(+) friends in the late 90's. There were a group of 10 people that I hung out with literally every day, and I'd see the rest at events which I mostly found out about through fliers that we'd make and pass to each-other.

The same people still exist and are around, but hardly anyone makes fliers anymore. If I didn't have a Facebook account, even if only just to notify me of upcoming events, I'd see a lot less of everybody.

I would have to agree. I have a facebook account that I check maybe once a week. I have no posts on my wall, no photos of me, rarely comment on other people's posts and I have my security settings up so high that people often don't know I have an account (I use my very common real name, but only a spam email address and no other contact info, even my birthday is fake).

Have I missed invites to events? Sure! But only those events where the host wasn't that interested in me coming. My close friends? They might invite me via facebook, but once I don't respond they call me because they actually value my presence.

However, I have used it to keep in touch with people from the past, it's great for that. Those "friends" who you talk to once or twice a year, but who are always nice to keep up with.

I guess my point is that it easy to have an active, fulfilling social life without facebook, but it has it's uses.

> "People had small groups of tight-nit friends with whom they shared REAL experiences."

And yet, they still do.

One thing I heavily dislike about the Facebook narrative is how it's portrayed as two mutually exclusive choices. Either you have hundreds of people who poke at each other in superficial ways or you have tight-knit circles.

The reality is that people have both, and have always had both. Facebook has improved our connection to the extended-acquaintances circle, it hasn't taken away our close friends.

As it grows, it hasn't really improved my close friendships, either. I was originally in love with Facebook precisely because it improved those relationships.

Things were a bit different in college, I guess, when only .edu email holders were on the site. I'm not sure if that's because it was a safe walled garden for students to be themselves online or if it was because I had a much higher ratio of close friends to extended relationships. Either way, as the site has grown and more Bosses and Grandmas have joined, normally complex people who interact with me differently than the Boss or Grandma were suddenly forced to act in a lowest common denominator way.

I'll admit that the reason I left Facebook (late 2009) had little to do with privacy or advertising and more to do with the fact that most of my friends stopped posting pictures and self-censored because both Grandma and the Boss might see it. If I wanted interesting human contact, Facebook was decreasingly the place to find it.

Anyway, my gripe about the Facebook narrative, in addition to the one you just brought up, is that Facebook is the de facto place to communicate with anyone. It's not. It may be the path of least resistance in communicating with those acquaintances, but there are hundreds of ways to get in touch with people now. Facebook's grasp of social interaction is less of a stranglehold and more of a thin curtain that people, for whatever reason, refuse to look behind.

People don't make plans anymore, make fliers for their parties, etc. So if you decide that you don't want to participate in social networks online, it essentially means that you're opting out of society offline as well: you simply won't be included in those social plans.

In my experience, this simply isn't true (I'm not on FB). If your friends do not value your presence enough to contact you via some method other than Facebook, they're not worth having, and most public events also inform people via other methods (email, websites, twitter etc). I would draw a distinction between closed social networks (which require you to sign up and agree to a degree of data-mining just to view content), and open social networks, which act as a broadcast medium. I'm not in your obligatory network effect, and don't want to be; it really hasn't affected my life in the slightest, so yes we do have a choice, and it's really easy and pain-free to say no to FB.

Saying you must be on FB for your life to function is really a post-hoc rationalisation for a choice already made, and as FB becomes more user-hostile while catering to its advertisers, we'll see more people coming up with this excuse for continuing to participate, but the real reason most people are there is simply because it's what everyone they know is doing and through inertia, not because it is necessary in some fundamental way. I've been reading more and more people talking about giving it up recently though.

It's quite possible to have a happy and fulfilling social life without FB or other closed social networks, particularly as you get older and rely on your established network of friends. Email, texts, phones, blogs, websites etc. all existed before the FB ghetto, and will exist afterward. I'm not convinced there is a future for an exclusive social network like FB, which tries to force you to participate and be tracked (even unwillingly) as the cost of interacting with your 'friends' online - that's just too high a cost for people to pay in the long run for simple online interactions which can be done elsewhere on the open web. If FB was open and not intent on selling your data and your life, it would be more attractive, but as it is not, it's not worth joining IMHO.

Sure you have a choice. I deleted my Facebook account years ago, I have a perfectly functioning social life. Some things are slightly more inconvenient but there's really not many of them. I saw a large reduction in the amount of useless crap I read online and didn't notice any reduction in the quality of any of my meaningful relationships, since let's face it - who develops or maintains meaningful relationships on Facebook? At best it's a means to find people in the real world to do that with.

To characterize it as a choice only legitimizes this thing as something we have control over and have opted into, rather than something that has happened to us.

You're right that it's something that has happened to us, but it has happened by choice and you can still choose if you want to.

> "who develops or maintains meaningful relationships on Facebook?"

I've done both. I've also formed and maintained meaningful relationships on other websites.

There's a definite cost-benefit tradeoff. It can be a huge time sink. It can bury you in games that aren't even remotely fun. It can lead to ideological arguments that destroy friendships. But it can also help you keep up with friends and relatives, reconnect with old friends, and even discover new friends-of-friends who you'd never have the opportunity to meet in person.

It's really a matter of how you and your friends use it.

I think your willingness to accept this as the truth is more telling of your own disposition than any of ours. Of course we have the choice.

I don't participate in Facebook, but I've yet to see any indication that I've "opted out of society offline". I have plenty of friends and regularly get invited to events (via, you know, my phone). If anything, I think opting out of social networking has only increased my value since my day-to-day activities haven't saturated the market.

And the people I go out to dinner with don't take photographs of their food or talk about what they "liked" on Facebook. Do you work for Facebook or something? Your life sounds like a commercial for it.

Yeah, I was pissed that my community college class, and this was over a couple years ago, had some extra material only available through the class facebook account. It was just assumed that everyone was on it, like assuming if you are human you need oxygen.

I think you're half right. If you opt-out of the online precursors to offline gatherings, then yes you'll be left out of those offline gatherings. That's still separate from whether your friends are the type to take pictures of their food and post to Facebook in the middle of dinner.