What I'm about to write will seem remarkably obvious to many but
incredidly strange to others. Furthermore, I beleive that those who
will find it obvious will still find it strange that it
took so long for me to write it.
I closed my Facebook account.
I've never been a Facebook heavy user; I opened an account just
to see what it was all about without looking to get in touch with
anyone. For a time, it was all good, not terribly useful but
peacefully pleasant, just like a barren snow field. Then I started to
have Facebook "friends".
One big problem is the low barrier of entry to send a friend request.
On Facebook, you get friend requests from people who could not care
less about you and whom we've not talked to for more then a decade,
from people whom you've only exchanged a glance with. On retrospect,
the best thing to do is to ignore those, but that won't solve the root
of the problem.
Most people suck at Facebook. It's not that they have bad
intensions or that they are dumb -- I've seen incredibly smart persons
suck at Facebook -- it's that Facebook rewards annoying behaviors. I
won't say much about games, because it should be obvious to anyone
that there is no way in hell that I should find it interesting that
you've established and imaginary drug cartel on some imaginary island
in the middle of an imaginary nowhere.
If you think otherwise, imagine me calling you every time I solve the
Rubik's Cube.
And then there's the status update. In the best case, it's used to
broadcast irrelevant trivia about someone's life, which is annoying
but not particularly harmful. But it does not stop there because the
status update is a poweful tool to reach instantly a broad audience,
and that's the root of the problem. As soon as someone in a
particular network starts to use the status update to promote stuff,
where stuff can be anything, and not necessarily stuff for
sale, others see that opportunity and the wave goes on. From there,
the noisy TV turns into a blinking billboard.
I decided that it was too much for me when I realized that I was doing
the same. When you reach that point, it's clear that whatever benefit
there is to Facebook certainly cannot outweight the damage that it
does to you.
