Breaking up with Facebook

I recently quit Facebook. It was a pretty big part of my life for quite a long time, so I’m feeling the loss. Unsurprisingly, I miss keeping in touch with friends and relatives in one convenient location. I also miss the buzz of social interaction, even if I’m only observing from the sidelines. I think these two factors are the biggest draws for most people to social media in general, but to Facebook in particular. It has done a tremendously good job of creating an environment of participation and interconnecting social worlds. I have friends who range from mildly introverted to fully agoraphobic who have found this medium to be tremendously useful for being active and involved with other human beings (a universal need). I also know people who suffer from various illnesses who find tremendous comfort in having an opportunity for online community.

A more surprising loss for me has been having an outlet for my random little thoughts throughout the day. I’m an external processor—I feel the need to share my ideas before they seem complete to me. Facebook was a great way to get this done without annoying my husband and friends with frequent interruptions during the day. Truthfully, I also crave external validation. I have a hard time completing even the most trivial task without receiving some kind of affirmation. Should I be able to do this for myself? Absolutely, but I guess I still have some growing up to do, because I still want other people to pat me on the back for a job well done. This is especially true for tasks that I find boring, but necessary, or very challenging. I also miss having a one-stop posting venue for updates about the kids and their witticisms.

So why did I leave? I found that Facebook was distorting my perceptions of reality in a number of ways—primarily through repeated online interactions with friends of varying degrees of real life intimacy and through the reinforcement of preconceptions. Both of these are huge issues which I will treat separately, but I’d also like to mention the usual issues such as the lack of privacy and the aggressive advertising. Pretty much everyone acknowledges the need for Facebook to make money through advertising; what people object to is the way it’s done. Do they really have to own everyone’s personal photographs in order to make money?

The distortion of friendship via social media is something that I think is underappreciated, if acknowledged at all. While there are absolutely genuine and important functions for these media to play (see above) it is also true that repeatedly interacting with folks tends to raise their importance in our minds (and also to move them to the top of our news feeds.) I have been thrilled to reconnect with dear old friends as well as high school buddies and former coworkers. I had a policy of only accepting (or issuing) friend requests from/to folks that I actually had met in real life, so I didn’t have the disturbing issue of phony persons interacting with me. (My husband went through quite a dramatic encounter with one such entity, who was part of a political forum that he helped moderate.) Facebook facilitated the deepening of some of these relationships for me, and for that I am truly grateful.  However it also had the unsettling and largely unconscious effect of overemphasizing relationships based on frequency.  Some of these popular apps would tell you who your “best friends” were based on Facebook interactions, but clearly someone who was not part of the community could never be seen as such, nor could someone who simply doesn’t use the medium that often. The cynical, paranoid part of me sort of believes that that’s exactly the intended consequence—that the powers that be in this company would like for us to use our real world influence to pressure our friends and relatives to “join the borg”. Such a science-fictionesque reading is not necessary though to be troubled that my brain is being subtly influenced (through frequency of contact and placement in my feed) to think that my long, lost, high school buddy is actually a more important “friend” than my mother (who was, until very recently, not on Facebook at all, and still is an infrequent user.) Many of my favorite people are not a part of the Facebook community, and some people that I don’t even really get along with that well were constant contributors to my “news feed”. Folks were also disproportionately represented by the amount of time they had to dedicate to the project. Independent contractors, retirees, stay-at-home parents, and the unemployed made up a large proportion of the posters in my personal FB world. That left all of those other folks, who just didn’t have the time, out of the loop, but of course they aren’t less important to me because they have work that precludes their access to a computer during the day. It was a lot easier to keep in touch with everyone in one place, but some people weren’t there. Now everyone is on an equal footing again.

Which brings me to the second big issue for me—reinforcement of preconceptions, homogeneity of thought and/or overreaction to dissent. It turns out that folks on Facebook, by and large, only want affirmation for their already accepted beliefs. I found this out the hard way. I tried to engage in dialogue, but I was clearly told that it was not desired. Unfortunately for me and my friends, it took me a few spectacular failures before I finally accepted that this was a deep truth that I could not change. One of the big differences between the written word and the spoken word is emotional context. I have no doubt that with the majority of these friends, I could have easily and relatively calmly expressed my objections to their viewpoint without any great acrimony, but the written word does not as readily convey the underlying empathy and connection that a personal conversation does. In fact, one thoughtful and mature friend took the time to stop an online debate in midstream to pick up the phone and give me a call. We had a very nice, civil discussion, which had the effect of driving home for me the preference for a voice conversation over a written one. Another important contributor to the inherent difficulties Facebook communications is the fact that it is a public forum, and as such we have the additional aspect of individuals feeling the need to “save face” or avoid embarrassment. Generally people are more receptive to changing their views if they have time to process the conflicting or new information in private, and they don’t want to feel publicly chastised or corrected. While I understand and appreciate these dynamics, I think they end up accentuating a growing problem in our nation—polarization. This was really made clear to me during the recent election cycle. I believe on the one hand that people feel bombarded by oppositional points of view. With the tacit understanding that it’s not polite to disagree, we’re left with feeling that the “other side” is “pushing” their ideas on us. This feeling creates a reactionary feeling where we end up, on the other hand, pushing our own views out there, again with the clear understanding that we are only looking for sympathy and agreement. I think this creates a vicious cycle of feeling aggrieved and being unwilling to engage. In real life, we largely avoid these more hostile feelings by concentrating on our connections, such as our belonging to the same family during a holiday meal or being members of the same church or club. When our connection is narrowed to the types of interactions that are possible in cyberspace, and when our ability to disengage is as easy as one click, we leave ourselves vulnerable to increasing intolerance.

So I am done, at least for now, I want to go back to something more authentic and traditional, you know like email and texting—only partly kidding. But seriously, even with these other forms of new technology, there is a more level playing field—no one can “promote” themselves, nor do they get moved to the top of the heap just because of the frequency of interaction. I’m also going to try to spend some time on the blog and Twitter. I like Twitter, because for me, it’s a non-stop stream of fascinating articles, which was one of the big draws to Facebook in the first place. People seem to be posting fewer of them on FB these days too, which is another disincentive for me. So I’m not forgetting about social media altogether, but I’m taking my time to do other things.