so long facebook
by asi
just over a week ago I got myself on facebook and i’ve decided today to let go. i got sticky and tired. facebook is wonderful and it’s all very well put together, to the point that it’s addictive. for me, it’s like big, candy-coated cake. it was really tasty but after a short while it became somewhat cloying.
of course you can take it in much smaller doses and i can definitely see the appeal to many people but all these dozens of sweet yet overly infantile applications and all the poking and spunking and hugging and zombieing and wall-to-wall and…
this relentless over-socializing is tiring. i found myself enjoying it for a while but this overdose of hugely addictive pseudo-wit and imbecility, it’s just not for me.
interestingly enough the bit i enjoyed most and made me reconsider my opinion was the twitter-like feature where people write what they are doing now. I totally get the appeal in it but i experienced this with very mixed feelings. on the one hand i’m sold to the idea of ambient intimacy – there is indeed something charming in the ways it makes us feel closer to people we somehow care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like. but on the other hand there’s a very very thin line between the charm and intimate wit to the excessive, sticky noise and personally I’m not good with being selective and taking these things in small doses. i really envy people who can.
I empathise too much with people. i find people extremely interesting even if they are not always like so. thats why i struggle to keep my blogroll to under a hundred. if I didn’t have other stuff to do I could have sit and read and comment on blogs all day long. same with facebook same with twitter. but at the end of the day It really provides no benefit and value to me. so i’m stepping out so i can focus on the stuff that does.
Great points. I hadn’t really thought of it, but I follow the “small doses” pattern of use with Facebook, Myspace & Twitter. They’re fun and I dig the connections, but I can’t ever bring myself to use and enjoy all the different tools those services provide. Anyway, thanks for putting in writing something I was thinking.
Ah, the backlash begins.
Virtual worlds are all well and good, but like you say – they distract from the real business of living life and doing important (most often, non-virtual) things.
I worry about the lack of mystery sometimes – I know more about people now than every before, and sometimes finding out about people is all the fun.
How funny, I’ve just read Jeremy’s post on the Penguin blog saying he doesn’t ‘get’ Facebook.
I’m beginning to wonder if there’s some sort of gender difference in response to FB – particularly amongst the digital immigrant generation. The main reason I love it is it’s the first social media that has had any sort of attraction to my traditional friendship group (as opposed to all the people I’ve met through blogging etc. – it’s difficult to talk about these distinctions when everything is so blurry!). But I’ve noticed that my female friends are much more likely to be on there and active.
It’s kind of like how in families and couples, women are more likely to take responsibility for things like the joint social diary, card giving and present buying, and guardianship of family photo albums (at least they did pre-digital).
[...] saving this dish for the occasion of me starting twittering (;-)) but after my so-long-facebook-drama-queen-post I thought I ought to explain why I’m back [...]