Considering Pulling the Plug

. . . on Facebook. I came very late to the Facebook game, but I’m very tempted to leave early. There were a couple of things that got me to finally get on it. One reason was some business considerations. Mainly it’s how most of my friends and family stay in contact.

People are lazy. They assume just about everybody is on Facebook. If they want to leave a group message, that’s the way it’s done. Hardly anybody wants to bother to contact people another way, be it e-mail, phone, text or whatever.

As much as I limit my Facebook time, it’s still a considerable time suck. The platform is designed to engage you as much as possible. They don’t care if it’s with cute kittens or horrific news about something you care about. The longer you are on, the more they can charge advertisers. The best and brightest are working very hard to monopolize your time and attention.

Before I was on Facebook I felt pretty superior, but that was dishonest. While I didn’t go on-line to check what was happening, my lovely wife did. Then she’d inform me or even have me read the information off her computer. After doing that long enough, the only honest thing was to get my own account.

Recently it occurred to me that while quite a few things engage my attention on Facebook, very little of that interest turns into action. For example, I may be upset about some news item across the country, but I’m not going to drive across the country and do something about it. There’s also the trap that the algorithms optimize things to what you are already biased towards.

So I have to ask myself what will be lost if I get off Facebook. Will people forget about me? Will I no longer be invited to events? Well, if that’s all it takes to be forgotten, I guess it’s not that important to me either.

On the upside, I expect to become a lot more mellow, with a Zen-like calm.

Of course, it would make no sense to give up my account only to look over my wife’s shoulder at her’s. However, she’s thinking about getting off it too. Won’t that be interesting?

-Sixbears