I first joined Facebook way back in 2007 or so, I can’t remember exactly when. Back then it was innocent and unassuming. There were no ads, and there were very few people on it, and fewer still who knew what it was. Heck, I was on it and I barely knew what it was. I had only one or two friends and we’d poke each other back and forth for no good reason, and that was the extent of my participation for a long time. But then something happened. Facebook exploded; the sweet innocent mogwai was transformed into the gremlin it has become today.
Without most of us being aware of it, Facebook took over our lives. Suddenly everyone was on Facebook. Even our moms were on Facebook. What started as just another online ‘profile’ became the online profile. Everything started happening through the centralized and very controlled Facebook Empire. Photo albums moved to Facebook. Email was, at least partially, replaced by Facebook. It wasn’t an event until it was on Facebook…
Over time I came to realize that Facebook was no longer just my online profile, it was Facebook’s online profile of me. Over time it became more and more clear that the only healthy, smart thing to do would be to quit Facebook forever. So here are the reasons that I did just that.
Facebook wants to know everything about you.
Facebook isn’t content with you sharing only what you want to share, they do everything they can to make sure you share everything whether you want to or not.
Never was this more evident than when Facebook started badgering me to fill in parts of my profile I had intentionally left out. I’d log in and it would ask me where I went to school. Not content with that it would ask me to fill in the dates. It wanted to know each and every book I’d read, movie I’d watched, place I’d travelled to, or band I’d listened to, what my political views are. Well, I am sorry Facebook, but that’s none of your business, nor is it the business of your advertisers.
Even if you manage to resist Facebook’s constant attempt to get you to part with more and more info, you’ll still probably end up sharing more than you’d like. This is because Facebook makes their privacy controls intentionally complex and hard to understand. And even if you do figure it out, they also designed it to make it easy for you to “accidently” set everything back to public because the control is not just a simple setting in one place; it appears on every post you make. If you change it once, it changes it for all future posts. No big deal you say? Then try uploading a new cover photo (cover photos are always public) and then watch as all of your future posts are mysteriously public again.
Facebook really doesn’t want you to quit.
More than once I have considered quitting Facebook, and each time I have failed to do it. Facebook intentionally makes it hard to quit. If you try to deactivate your account it presents you with a random sampling of your “friends” who are supposedly going to “miss” you. Yeah right. But it makes sure you know that you can come back at any time and your profile will reappear just were you left it.
Of course that’s not the real way you quit Facebook. That only hides your profile, it doesn’t delete it. The real way to quit his hidden deep in Facebook’s help docs, and the only way you’re likely to find it is through Google. If you choose this option it warns you ahead of time that what you are doing is permanent and that there is no going back, ever! Except that’s a lie because after you push the big red button they send you an email letting you know you have two weeks to change your mind. All you have to do is log in again and it will be like none of this ever happened.
It’s like a couple having a fight where one partner says, “if you walk out that door you aren’t ever coming back in!”, and as soon as the other one calls the bluff and walks out the door they get a phone call begging them to come home.
Facebook doesn’t want you or your data to leave them, and they’ll do everything they can to suck you back in if you try to leave.
Facebook is bad for your relationships.
Contrary to bringing people together and helping them communicate, Facebook is destructive to friendships and relationships.
Facebook causes you to know too much about your friends. In the real world we have filters on our speech, and we are aided by body language when we communicate. If you’re around a certain person and a topic comes up that they aren’t comfortable with, you’ll get an instant reaction from them and you’ll know not to go there with that person. Certain people don’t need to know certain things about you, and vice versa. Some friendships are shallow and it’s best if they stay that way.
In Facebook land this doesn’t happen. If you post something that upsets someone you won’t know until it’s too late. And sure Facebook gives you some control in regards to sorting between friends and acquaintances, but again they make it hard to use and hard to maintain. And even if it were all super simple and easy you can never escape the fact that textual communication is inherently prone to misunderstandings because without being able to see someone’s face and body language you can’t always be sure of their meaning. It’s just an unhealthy way to communicate. I had more than a few “battles” on Facebook which caused nothing but stress and anxiety because of a difference of opinion.
And what about the stuff other people post? I can’t tell you how many “friends” I lost all respect for because their actions on Facebook betrayed their stupidity, complete lack of integrity, poor reasoning skills, or just general un-likability. It kinds of sucks, sometimes it’s just better not to know.
The other thing Facebook makes difficult is the ending of friendships. We all grow in this life, some of us at different speeds than others, and all of us in different directions. Sometimes we discover that certain people in our lives no longer fit. In the real world you’d just stop seeing these people and they would gradually drift from your life, maybe without them even being aware of it. In Facebook land this doesn’t work because one way or the other they are going to realize something’s up. If you de-friend them they’ll know, and if you don’t they’ll continue to see your status updates and images of you spending time with other people and so on. And I don’t even think I need to mention the trouble that can develop if you keep your ex on Facebook. It results in messy, unhealthy relationships and even messier ends to them.
But what about your real world relationships with the people you do see? The people you know and love? Well those suffer too. I can’t even tell you how many times my fiancée and I have been lying in bed checking Facebook on our phones instead of interacting with each other or otherwise doing something healthy and useful like reading a book.
Facebook is about being shallow and lazy.
Let’s be honest. Facebook is the ultimate reflection of the banality and superficiality of our modern society. The Facebook audience wants a constant supply of cute kitten pictures and lame memes. And nothing else. If you dare to post anything that requires someone to use their brains or question their narrow minded viewpoints in any way or worse have to click through and spend a few minutes of their life reading or watching something enlightening instead of wasting their life on Facebook, prepare to have your posts ignored in the future at best, or at worst you might have a “well-meaning” friend try to talk some sense into you.
So if you have interests beyond cute kittens and celebrity gossip, and you aren’t particularly interested in shallowly and artificially “liking” the vacation and baby photos of people you barely know then there really isn’t much for you on Facebook.
Facebook has no purpose, for you anyway.
I know what you’re thinking: But Facebook helps me stay in touch with my friends!
No it doesn’t.
It helps you “stay in touch” with strangers who you would otherwise forget all about and not miss one bit. If they were really your friends you’d be keeping in touch with them by phone, text messages or even good ol’ fashioned email. If they were your friends you would be in possession of this contact info. Liking their photos and status updates and occasionally sending a message asking how they are and pretending you’re going to get together “sometime” is not friendship. It’s bullshit. I recently heard that the average person has only four real friends. That’s the average person! That means that some people have fewer real friends than that, maybe only one or two (which bring up another point, how many people end up feeling really bad about themselves because Facebook made them think they don’t have as many “friends” as other people?).
So if Facebook’s purpose isn’t to help you stay in touch with friends, then what is it?
To sell you stuff of course. But before that it’s to collect all your data and sell that to the people who want to see you stuff. It’s really quite sick if you actually stop and think about it.