Anti social networking

The important thing is not to feel anything out of the public eye.

I kind of, totally hate facebook. But I’m on there for a reason. And I don’t mean there’s a reason I go to the site, rather there’s a reason I don’t give in to any of my frequent whims to delete my account and never look back. Although ‘whim’ sounds a little too pleasant, it’s more like an anti-whim of disgust, not a whimsical whim of delight.

I may not like that voyeuristic blackhole, but it’s such a significant part of our culture that I have to understand it. The annoying part is that unlike my twitter and tumblr accounts, I can’t base my facebook account on something that interests or amuses me (in fact, I’m mostly able to enjoy twitter because my personal account is limited to people I’m genuinely interested in, while my considerably more popular non-personal account is all about a topic I’m personally--not professionally--interested in).

The first reason I hate facebook is that it entangles you with people you don’t even care about. I was looking recently at the “people you may know” and there were a few people listed who I thought I was friends with (bullshit facebook friends, I mean, not actual friends). But still there’s a twinge of rejection, and as I sat there thinking, Wait, wait, you assholes actually unfriended me? And I don’t know that, maybe I never added them. But I wondered, WHY DO I CARE? These are people who live in other parts of the country and I wouldn’t even call if I were visiting the towns where they live. And yet I let this annoying technology keep them in the periphery of my life when in reality, I should already be struggling to remember their names.

The second reason is the oversharing. It’s something we joke about as though it’s an unstoppable force, but the way that the entire concept of privacy is disappearing from our lives? That’s not an earthquake or a tidal wave, we are 100% responsible for it. But I understand, I don’t want to be the one who comments, “People you went to camp with when you were 11 don’t want to hear your emotionally raw breakdowns. You just made me uncomfortable.” I’m not even going to say the worst thing that someone on my friends’ list ever posted--I’ll just say it was a photo that was so inappropriate, honestly, it would make you uncomfortable just reading about it (that should establish that it wasn’t about nudity or even sexual in nature, right?).