Facebook exodus

You can read HERE about signs of Facebook fatigue, including the loss of 7 million users in North America.

My peak of anger against Facebook (over their violations of privacy) came in spring 2010. At the time I deleted my page completely, though I had little choice but to rejoin in January/February 2011 in order not to miss out on all the Egyptian Revolution information, which was mushrooming on the Facebook site at the time. Now I use Facebook mostly as a “read-only” site, posting almost nothing of my own anymore but using it to access information posted by others.

All the reasons people cite against Facebook in this article seem like valid objections. But I think that, in McLuhanian terms, they can be boiled down to phenomena related to “overheated media.” There is a glut of everything there– invitations, friends, games, wall posts to be read. It’s all too exhausting, and eventually the payoff proves to be limited.

But my own primary objections to Facebook remain the same as they were 18 months ago:

*privacy problems

*inability to keep different parts of one’s life separate (I had several people commit moderate gaffes in saying things on my wall that not all 200 of my Facebook friends needed to know at that stage, and this experience has probably been shared by all of you)

*social pressure to add people to your friends list who you really don’t want on there in the first place

*friends no longer emailing because they say they were “already keeping up with my news on Facebook”

*the annoying tendency of many people to use Facebook messages rather than email, making it harder to keep track of past correspondence

Facebook was extremely fun when I first started using it in 2007. Then, like email itself, it stopped being fun and became an obsessive chore.

There’s only one person in the CNN article whom I find to be a bit of an ass. This guy:

“Joshua DeRosa, a Salt Lake City graphic artist and former Facebook user, agrees. ‘I don’t need to see pics or hear updates about people’s babies,’ he says. ‘I know what babies look like, and while you might think what Junior did was the cutest thing ever, I couldn’t care less.'”

I’m not sure what Mr. DeRosa expects people to put on their Facebook pages to amuse his precious time, but if people are proud of their new babies, I think we should cut them a bit of slack. That’s a universally respected topic of interpersonal conversation; the delight taken by most people in infants is one of the pillars of human society, and ought to be safe ground on a site such as Facebook.

No, the truly annoying thing is people saying tactless things that they should never be saying in a crowded room. And that’s what ultimately makes Facebook such a horrible idea in principle: why would you want all 400 people you know gathered in the same room making comments about you? Clearly it’s only a matter of time before something embarrassing happens.