1371: Cutting the Cord

You’ll recall that I’ve been contemplating this for some time now, but as I promised to myself, I’ve reached a decision: the Monday after this one just coming, I’m deactivating my Facebook account.

“Who cares?” I hear you say. And, well, that’s sort of the point, really; I don’t care about Facebook. It is largely useless to me these days.

As I noted in my post a few days ago, there’s been a noticeable shift in the quality of posts among my Facebook friends recently. While I don’t blame any of them for wanting to share things that are important to them personally, it’s getting to the point where there’s so much noise that there’s not any room for conversation any more.

Social media is increasingly becoming “fire and forget”; people post something designed to get noticed — perhaps a passive-aggressive status update, or some sort of sociopolitical rant, or an Upworthy article with a particularly smug title — and then wait for the comments and likes to roll in. And then… nothing. Nothing at all. There’s no discussion — except in rare sociopolitical cases where you can guarantee there’ll be at least one person coming along to state the opposite opinion and start a tedious circular argument in which no-one ever agrees to disagree — and no real value to it all. For me, anyway.

I remember being resistant to Facebook when it first started getting big. A number of my real-life friends were encouraging me to jump aboard — remember, Facebook used to only allow you to add people you actually knew — but I thought it was going to be a passing Myspace-ish fad, and as such held off for a long time. I finally gave in while I was on holiday in the States visiting my brother, and Facebook proved to be a good means of sharing the photos I’d taken — photos that I was particularly keen to share because I’d started experimenting a bit more with composition and editing.

All was good for a while; Facebook’s Groups and Events features served their purpose for a while, too, proving to be a practical means of organising collections of people and inviting people to events. But increasingly, over time, and as Facebook started to become more and more popular and more open, these features lost their value. When was the last time you responded to an Event invite? When was the last time you joined a Group?

I can trace the beginning of Facebook’s downfall from my personal perspective to a fairly precise moment — it was back when they started making it into a “platform” instead of simply a site; back when Facebook games and “apps” first started appearing. I was initially in favour of this — the accompanying site redesign that came with the launch of the Facebook platform made the site look a whole lot better on big, high-resolution monitors, and it was and still is a potentially good idea to have the site act a bit like an operating system.

Unfortunately, things just declined from there. There started to be too much of everything. Too many games, too many people, too many ways of posting. People felt obliged to share each and every mundane little thing about their lives, egged on by other people and the mass media. Today, you can’t watch the news without the newsreader demanding to “let us know what you think”; you can’t watch a new TV show without a hashtag appearing in the corner.

These things aren’t bad in isolation, of course. It’s neat to be able to discuss a TV show in real time while it’s on; it’s cool that people have a medium of self-expression and communication that simply wasn’t really possible and practical pre-broadband and smartphones. But everything just adds up to a frustrating experience, and it all but destroys the original point of Facebook — a cosy little private network where you could easily communicate with your real-life friends and share select photos and notes with them.

Times have changed. I haven’t gone with them. And I’m fine with that. As such, the Monday after next, my Facebook account is going kaputt. I’m leaving a week’s leeway in order to ensure that those people who do want to stay in touch have the opportunity to pick up my alternative contact details; those who don’t bother? Well, it’s probably time I cut those people out of my life, anyway.

If you’re reading this, have (or indeed had, if you’re reading this after the fact) me on Facebook and want to know alternative means of getting in touch with me if you don’t already have them, let me know via a comment on this post — be sure to leave your email address in the appropriate field.

Tata, Facebook. It’s been fun. It’s not you, it’s me.

Actually, it is you.