My friend Lyn sent me this article, and once I got past the stuff about the history of friendship and on to the op-ed about how Facebook devalues friendships, I was into it. It put a lot of the things that I'd been thinking in to words.
I had another friend tell me that I'd regret leaving Facebook, and that he thought it was a "rash" decision. It wasn't. I'd been thinking about it for a while, actually. The weird privacy settings, the fact that you have to "reject" people who you don't want to be friends with, or just accept everyone, or defriend people...whatever. It bothers me. It's like being in a crowded room with a lot of people you'd just rather avoid. I'm not the kind of person who wants to have superficial contact with a lot of people. I'd rather have meaningful contact with a few people. My friend Jeff says that it keeps marginal friendships alive. There isn't a single person on Facebook who I want to keep in touch with who's phone number or email address I don't have. And this is because I've put a lot of effort into the relationships I have in my life. Real friendships take effort. Facebook doesn't.
Not to mention the ads that are on there and the fact that "we are conducting market research on ourselves."
It's interesting to think that deciding NOT to be on Facebook is the outlier position, when only a year or two ago the exception was to be on a social networking site.
And about finding people, I suppose people could google me and come up with a way to get in touch if they really wanted to. Rather than seeing my name somewhere on someone's wall and friend requesting me without any note or anything at all. I got friend requests from people I'd never met before. I guess it's cool that maybe you could meet someone new on Facebook, but it's just too easy to let your tally of friends rack up with people you'll never see again, or even talk to again.
Anyway, here is a link to the piece.
I found these paragraphs particularly interesting:
"The most disturbing thing about Facebook is the extent to which people are willing—are eager—to conduct their private lives in public...Are we really so hungry for validation? So desperate to prove we have friends?
But surely Facebook has its benefits. Long-lost friends can reconnect, far-flung ones can stay in touch. I wonder, though. Having recently moved across the country, I thought that Facebook would help me feel connected to the friends I'd left behind. But now I find the opposite is true. Reading about the mundane details of their lives, a steady stream of trivia and ephemera, leaves me feeling both empty and unpleasantly full, as if I had just binged on junk food, and precisely because it reminds me of the real sustenance, the real knowledge, we exchange by e-mail or phone or face-to-face. And the whole theatrical quality of the business, the sense that my friends are doing their best to impersonate themselves, only makes it worse. The person I read about, I cannot help feeling, is not quite the person I know."
So that's a little more on the Facebook decision for now. It's definitely not a big deal, I mean who cares if I'm on it or off of it. Plus, why couldn't I just keep my account and not use it? To answer that question, it's too distracting to have an account and not use it. Maybe I'll go back on at some point. It's just that I've been thinking about Facebook more critically, and in a broader context, and what is this blog for if not to put random thoughts down?
No comments:
Post a Comment