TIME Article on Facebook

TIME Magazine's cover story this week is on Facebook and the privacy debate. Here's a link:

How Facebook Is Redefining Privacy

While I appreciate the neutral stance the author takes towards the evolution of Facebook, I still don't think he does enough to sound the alarms that it should. Though the article seems to see Facebook as something fascinating, perhaps a bit sinister, but nonetheless inevitable, its content made me want to run away even faster.

I became fed up with Facebook, when, a few weeks ago, I was forced to either publicly declare all my interests, favorite movies, books and bands, or have none at all. I chose the latter, and I'm glad I did. The recent changes to Facebook have all assumed that I want everyone I know to know everything I do. But I've never been like that, even in my everyday life. Not too long ago, it suddenly became hip to become a "fan" of anything and everything. You can be a "fan" of Tide detergent! What?! Now the "fan" button is gone entirely, replaced by and all-purpose "Like" button, which has been seeping into third-party sites as well. What Facebook is expecting we'll do is go around clicking "Like" buttons on everything on the internet. I suppose the real-world equivalent would be to leave sticky notes with your name on everywhere you go. Doesn't that sound ridiculous? It does to me.

The real problem for me, though, is that I'm really just an unpaid cog in Facebook's giant advertising machine. They want me to declare my approval things so they can tell my friends about it, and then tell the company that makes that thing that they deserve more money for publicizing it. Word-of-mouth publicity isn't bad per se. In fact, I prefer to hear about things that have a seal of approval from someone whose taste I know and trust. However, Facebook is just helping the awful talons of bandwagon propaganda sink deeper into our psyches and hearts. It's been slow, and it's been quiet, such that we hardly noticed. That's the creepy part.

Facebook is also trying to become the everything site. The article covers this as well. Eventually, the goal seems to be that the entire internet connect back to Facebook. This sounds like what AOL did ten years ago. Remember "keywords?" Already, products and movies put "become a fan on Facebook to learn more", or some such nonsense, in their ads. "Visit our Facebook page," they say. It's nice for them, because making a FB page is so much easier than making an actual website. I didn't like the AOL thing, and I don't like this.

Like the Skeletons of Soap Bubbles

On the path to paring down my presence on Facebook, I have mentioned that I want to eventually de-friend most of the people I'm connected to. While this sounds mean, it's worth remembering that I have literally no contact with the vast majority of people I'm "friends" with. A few years ago, when my love of the site was at its highest, it was thrilling to get friend requests from people I had not seen nor heard from in several years. When I was still in college, it was fun to be friends with people whom I might see around campus. Since those times, the purpose of Facebook has drastically changed. It used to simply be a place to declare your presence, make a statement, say, "Here I am!" These days, people gather around their news feeds like a water cooler at work. The problem is that I hardly know any of the people standing there with me. I've trimmed the content of my news feed down to a few dozen people, a list I call the "keepers." Of this list, only about 20 are on the site on a regular basis anyway, but those few are pretty active. But every other tenuous connection I have on Facebook represents nothing in the real world. The rest have to go.

To aid in my quest to tidy up my friends list, I was given some advice by my friend Thai, from UCSB, who directed me to his blog post on the same topic. He makes some excellent observations on the persistence of online connections even when the same relationships in the real world have evaporated like a soap bubbles (Have you ever seen the skeleton of a soap bubble? It's pretty cool.) until they're gone. They haven't popped, they have just ceased to exist. Along with his thoughts, my friend also provided a list of objective criteria for evaluating a "friend." This is just what I needed!

Here's Thai's list:

1) Will this person be at my wedding? If yes, keep. If no, proceed to next question…

2) Would this person pick me up from the airport? If yes, keep. If no, proceed to next question…

3) If I was visiting the city this person lived in, would I be comfortable meeting up with person for coffee & catch-up? If yes, keep. If no, proceed to next question…

4) If this person wrote on my wall, would I think, “WTF?” If yes, then delete. This is not a “friend.”

I've begun by creating a group in FB called "Not Even Coffee." Cold? Perhaps. But, let's be honest, if I wouldn't have coffee with a person, they won't miss me. And I'm okay with that.

An Overabundance of Friends

It feels shameful to admit that 90% of the time I spend on Facebook is not time that actually builds my relationships with people. I check out links people have posted; I make short, superficial comments on various posts; I try to come up with my own clever quip to put in my status box. The truth is, virtually everyone in the world I really care about rarely uses FB at all. So what am I actually spending all this time doing while reading the random ramblings of near-strangers? My one rationalization is that everyone I know on FB is someone I actually have met face-to-face and that I know how our acquaintance began. That said, the majority of people on my newsfeed haven't spoken to or seen me in over four years and I just skip right past their updates on my way to the 2 or 3 that are from people I want to hear from.

This all sounds terribly cruel. But I'm definitely not the first person to point out that FB helps us maintain "relationships" that would otherwise have just atrophied. I do value the fact that it has connected or reconnected me to people who are very physically distant (like my Australian cousins). But the real point that it's not making me any closer to most of the friends and family that I actually want to be close to. Those people I still have to send emails to, which I would do more of it I wasn't on Facebook waiting to hear from them.

So yesterday I made a special new sub-list of friends on Facebook that includes only people I'm interested in staying in contact with. This sounds borderline fascist, but it's another step towards cutting off my FB connection entirely. I've also started going through and "hiding" people who aren't on this list from my newsfeed. My web of connections will start to look a lot more like it did when I joined FB back in 2004, when I had 58 friends who all went to Berkeley. Gradually, I will start de-friending people until I'm down to just my special list. The only thing that scares me: those people I have de-friended will start getting "suggestions" from Facebook that they might know me, and then they'll know what I did! I'm gonna grin and swallow the embarrassment, though, because I really want out.

If life really were like Facebook...

This video predates the recalibration of FB to resemble Twitter, which happened about a year ago. The point still holds.

Facebook Purge: Day 2

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

I've begun searching for additional perspectives on quitting facebook. Here we learn about "Facebook Suicide" and the author's reasons for undertaking it. I quite agree with most of her analysis, although the cynic in me wonders if we've always secretly been narcissistic, and that FB hasn't just given us a convenient and public outlet.

I'm still working on establishing a convenient way of doing all that Facebook does without actually using it. If nothing else, Facebook is an easily accessed, centralized clearinghouse of all the information I see fit to share, and a place where I can find interesting stuff, too. Ideally, I will be able to link a newsfeed (Twitter) to some wall-posts (Blogger) to a collection of photo albums (Picasa) to an OpenID profile (Google and Gmail) to the website that I will soon create. All that's left is a way to get a digest of interesting articles my friends dig up. My friends are always posting news stories about politics and languages on FB, and I enjoy seeing those.

In other news, my car is in the shop getting a new timing belt. How do people usually manage day-long car repairs? Was someone supposed to come get me, or was I supposed to sit in the office all day? I took the bus part-way home and then had to walk mile, because the bus system here does not take transfers and I didn't have $6.00 for a day pass. A one way fare is $2.50 and you don't get a transfer?! This repair sets me back $600, but it's better than letting my timing belt snap, and I certainly was due for it. There goes half my tax refund! Good thing I got one!

Peace

First Post

First post!

I'm here attempting to divorce myself from facebook nightmares. After being forced to either make all my interests public and have updates from things like "Amelie" appear on my newsfeed, or have no profile information at all, I chose the latter. After reading this article, I am convinced that inertia is not enough to keep me using facebook. Through some quick research I discovered that I can use Google and blogger to accomplish all of the same things. It's been sheer laziness preventing me from leaving until now. And, honestly, I think I'll have more fun and more control over the identity I present here. Facebook has long been an alternative to a blog for me, and it's time I just went whole hog.

Join me!

Shalom.