Shunning Facebook and Living to Tell About it

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/technology/shunning-facebook-and-living-to-tell-about-it.htm

82 47 15 years ago

wakoumel• 15 years ago

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.

zalew2• 15 years ago

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

whyenot2• 15 years ago

Does Facebook tell your "friends" that you have deleted your account when you leave? If not it seems like the sort of thing many people would want to announce somewhere.

joezydeco• 15 years ago

Look up "Burger King Whopper Sacrifice" for the answer to that question.

zalew2• 15 years ago

no it doesn't, posts just disappear from the wall, you disappear from friends, although there were some bugs and sometimes you appeared as an empty avatar in some lists, such as page admins, etc.

still it's not about announcing lack of a specific communication channel (most of 'friends' don't care anyway), as I glanced at a few of them it's more about making a scene (facebook would be a good place for that. zing!).

wetbrain• 15 years ago

I think so. I'm not sure, but when I deleted mine a while back I got texts from friends wondering if I was okay, or dead, or mad at them. So there was at least some way they figured out I was gone. It may have just been that they couldn't find me anymore, but the texts came in almost immediately after clicking the delete button.

It was kinda entertaining how so many people assumed that something major had to have happened for me to get rid of Facebook. Really it just started as a bet and then I never got back on.

edwardunknown• 15 years ago

No, but it's nice to mass-PM your friends before you do it so they won't think you unfriended them. I feel much better after deleting it, bottom line is it's just a piss poor means of communication and screws up more relationships than it creates.

jamesbkel• 15 years ago

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.

dwiel• 15 years ago

One is designed to grab and keep your attention for as long as possible. One is designed to make it easy to keep track of contacts.

chenga• 15 years ago

I think that's an unfair statement though because Facebook can do a lot more than a Rolodex. I think we need to know more about how people spend their time on Facebook.

If they're spending time on games like Farmville, that's quite different from spending time looking at photos/profiles/statuses

richardburton5• 15 years ago

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 ;)

k-mcgrady3• 15 years ago

>> 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

Could you not have used the 'Sync' feature in the mobile app to sync everything to your phones address book?

richardburton5• 15 years ago

That was great for all the information that my friends had on Facebook. However, it was not great for all the stuff they did not have on there. The information I really wanted was their Skype names.

phillian• 15 years ago

This - "Twitter... It reflects the true asymmetry of human relationships."

What I loved about Twitter is that it gave me the onus of choice to include or ignore people that may have attended school with me, may have worked with me at one point, etc... but for one reason or another I no longer wanted involved in my personal lives. (Yes, I know Facebook has privacy walls but we all know how permeable they haven proven to be, nevermind their disconcerting rewording of the Terms of Service).

Twitter is also more inclusive and consistent with the 'whole character' of a person. On Facebook it is easy to be typecast or become monofocused among one group.. family, college classmates, frat buddies, whatever.

On Twitter I can lament my horrible Redskins every Sunday and talk affiliate marketing, code, or fishing in Alaska without breaking a stride.

Not to mention, I think the barrier to communicating with people we identify as 'out of reach' is much lower on Twitter than any other medium. Name an author and with effort you can probably exchange with them on Twitter.

Getting them to friend you back on Facebook? Probably not.

For the record, I am: http://twitter.com/phillian

richardburton5• 15 years ago

I completely agree. I am lots of things. I am different things to different people. I love hanging out with kiters and coders and sometimes those two groups of people overlap and sometimes they do not.

natesm• 15 years ago

I like Twitter because it is simple[1]. 140 char messages, reverse chronological order. That's it.

[1] I use Twitter for Mac, the website is kind of a mess actually.

dudurocha2• 15 years ago

Its been 3 months since I quit facebook. The reasons are very similar to yours, and I got some results from it.

1) I was very less popular than I thought. Even 3 months after, some people says " really, did you really quit facebook?". This shows me that maybe the 'socialization' and be friends with everybody was not true. People only care about themselves, and care if you liked their pictures and their stories.

2) I'm treated weird. "Why you don't have facebook???". And I have to come with a new story. Most of my male colleagues says that was because of my girlfriend( Here in brazil, for some reason, the man is supposed to have more than one girl).

3) I feel more free and less-overwhelmed. Man, Why do I need to know that Gabriela's Uncle in hospital? And Why do I need to know that your last trip to argentina was so amazing and you met all those beautiful girls? Well, now I don't know those things anymore, and dont miss it.

4) My friends have to reach me by the old channels. I'm receiving more email and sms messages. In facebook I had 700 friends. Now I have fewer friends ( of course!) but I'm so close to them, that I dont miss the other 680 that stayed in facebook.

Of course there are things that I miss, like when I went to a party and met new people, I think " man, I should friend them to facebook". But I don't anymore. If I got to be friends, I will met them personally. And I miss some events, people now create an facebook event, and invite all their friend list. Of course they will not remember you, they just invited everyone!

Anyway, I feel better for quitting facebook, and once and for all, twitter is still up and is a greater communication tool for me. I'm there as www.twitter.com/dudurocha

PS. Sorry for eventual bad spelling and grammar. English not my first language, and it's 2:23 AM.

richardburton5• 15 years ago

You are free! Taking the hooks out of your face feels so good.

dorian-graph• 15 years ago

I was out with friends for lunch and almost everyone was saying "Someone check us in on Facebook!!!"

It also removes the mystery in interactions and makes friendship cheap. I'll meet new people and one of us would say "Yeah, just add me on Facebook" and then both of you just become Facebook friends to each other, nothing more, nothing less.

vijayr• 15 years ago

I quit fb long ago, but for different reasons. I was never into this 'my' thing (I hate posing for photos etc). My problem was scrabble. I was spending hours playing scrabble every day, and it was much easier to find people to play scrabble with, on FB than elsewhere.

In any case, FB doesn't add any real value to life, that much I am convinced. I wonder how long before FB fatigue catches up with people, and they start using it less, if not quit outright?

satori99• 15 years ago

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.

vacri• 15 years ago

It does get better. People get used to contacting you through normal channels again, and they also learn that facebook is another 'in-crowd' and not everyone is on it - you can talk to 'facebookers' on it, but not 'everyone'.

k-mcgrady3• 15 years ago

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.

whazzmaster2• 15 years ago

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.

wes-exp2• 15 years ago

I haven't heard the term "A2K" before but it's ingenious. Is there a process for granting exceptions to the timeline restrictions? Even real Amish have exceptions like, "it's okay to use a gas-powered engine to harvest crops as long as it's not providing locomotive force".

I'm fine with no Facebook (glad even), but smartphones are another matter. What's the policy on them?

whazzmaster2• 15 years ago

Most of them grudgingly bought smartphones within the last year and now wouldn't give them up. I yell at them about it but they do fail as often as they succeed. On the other hand, one of them is doing a home birth... so there is that, I guess.

daimyoyo• 15 years ago

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.

shadowfiend• 15 years ago

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).

richardburton5• 15 years ago

I think my main motivation for leaving was more to do with wanting to spend my spare hours online connecting with people rather than browsing. I know Facebook Chat exists but it was so buggy, cluttered and poorly designed.

tobtoh2• 15 years ago

”I knew all these things about her, but I’d never even talked to her,

I don't think it necessarily unhealthy, but I guess it depends how you interpret 'talk'. I actually read that line as that Blacomb hadn't communicated with her at all - for example, I've got a whole bunch of 'friends' on FB whom I used to interact with at College, but we've gone our separate ways and now never speak to each other and all I see are their FB updates. In that sense, I think it is unhealthy if you associate that passive one-way comms as 'friendship'.

However, if you take his stament of 'never even talked to her' as literal voice communications, then I agree that I think it's perfectly fine. If theyare exchanging two-way comms on FB, I don't see it any different to a long distance relationship of old where people wrote letters to each other.

andrewfelix• 15 years ago

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.

tobtoh2• 15 years ago

There has been studies done which show that the 'keeping up with the Jones' aspect of facebook can increase depressive tendencies. So the improvement of your depressions could be as a result of this.

The study was mentioned in this article in Slate:

Is Facebook making us sad? http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/01/the_a...

Qz• 15 years ago

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

jc123• 15 years ago

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

DiabloD3• 15 years ago

I don't have one, nor do I have a Facebook account. Still not seeing the point.

piotr_krzyzek• 15 years ago

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.

codelust• 15 years ago

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.

mixmastamyk• 15 years ago

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.

mike-cardwell• 15 years ago

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.

VonLipwig• 15 years ago

I do the same, the only reason I keep the account is so people can include me in events organised via Facebook.

The only other time I go on it is when I get an email notification saying someone has sent me a message.

I don't bother with status updates or reading what other people write. If its interesting they will tell me when I see them. Unsurprisingly when I do see them I don't hear about 90% of the crap they put on Facebook.

billybob• 15 years ago

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.

theorique• 15 years ago

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.

Shunning Facebook and Living to Tell About it

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