Bye Bye Facebook. Living disconnected from the social network giant that dominates the web.
This weekend I made the decision that others have only dreamed of a few follow through with.
I deactivated my Facebook account.
For me, the principal reason behind this decision was the realization of the inordinate amount of time I was spending on the site. I’d check it on my phone in the morning, have it open on my laptop no matter what else I was doing it, and flick through it whenever I had nothing better to do. I was constantly connected to Facebook, and I’m not the only one. Don’t deny it, you probably do it too. You’re sat at home, you’re bored, what do you do? Many of us would choose to have a flick through the news feed, but it doesn’t stop there, we’ll spend ages scrolling right through, or checking out the profile of the new girlfriend of our best friends third cousin twice removed. Facebook, as we well know, has become the ultimate procrastination. But has it become more than that? Are we addicted to Facebook? If you had asked me this a while ago I would most probably have told you not to be so silly, and that we couldn’t possibly be addicted to the social networking giant. Now however, I am beginning to change my mind. If we weren’t hooked on the site, why would we dedicate such a large proportion of our time to it?
Another thing that concerns me about Facebook, although it can be said for any form of communication that doesn’t involve actually talking to people, is the difficulty in communicating exactly what you mean. A rushed response to a wall post quickly gets misinterpreted and before you know it the situation has spiraled way away from where it began. On Facebook it is very easy just to quickly reply to a message and put little thought into the words you use or how you may come across to a person that doesn’t know you or the context of what you said. At least with emails you are more likely to put some more thought into what you’re saying and anyway, it goes directly to the person you are trying to speak to, without the world and his wife butting in and getting the wrong idea.
Deactivating my Facebook account is also serving as a bit of an experiment, I believe that we are now far too reliant on the site and that those that don’t use it are potentially excluded from many opportunities. My experience with societies at uni is that they tend to use Facebook to set up their events and pass on important messages, few of these groups then back this up with emails, so what happens to the proportion of their members that don’t use Facebook? These people do exist, I promise you! They may be international students that have their own version, for example the Spanish tuenti (Looks just like Facebook in every way...). How do those members know what is going on? These days Facebook has pretty much eradicated the need to send emails/make phone calls to tell people what we are up to as once we have typed one post it is there for the world to see. God forbid we should actually need to print our photos to share them, or send a nice email to a friend to catch up. It’s all on Facebook, so what is the point?
I am almost certain that, like it or not, I am going to have to reactivate my Facebook account by the end of the summer. Not only because I have a society to commit to, that will be making full use of Facebook no doubt- but also sending emails(!) but because I think that I might well miss out on things in my final year of uni by choosing not to use it. This is wrong that we feel we have no choice in the matter, but would anyone dare to prove me wrong? Or join me in saying Bye Bye to Facebook for a while?
I’m really interested in what other people think about this so please get in touch with me! Rebecca.nobes1@btinternet.com
