Unliking Facebook

  • I go back and forth with Face­book, like a lot of peo­ple (Steve, for one). I was typ­i­cally late get­ting into it and since then I seem to always either be excited about the good stuff or fed up with the bad. It’s a way to keep up with peo­ple I don’t see much any­more, and I do like all the lit­tle sound-bytes of info. Oh look, So-and-so is think­ing of tak­ing water­color classes. Whats-his-name’s son is on the honor roll. Well, well.

    But then invari­ably I get frus­trated, both when I’m left want­ing more than just tiny tid­bits from oth­ers and when I want to say more myself. In Eliz­a­beth‘s post on Melinda’s Ortho­dox writ­ers series, she wrote:

    … I am now seri­ously ques­tion­ing whether Face­book is of ben­e­fit to me. Although great fun and a quick and easy way to keep in touch with peo­ple, Face­book is really not an easy medium for dis­cussing any­thing exten­sively or par­tic­u­larly seri­ously, and is quite dif­fi­cult to go back and revisit con­ver­sa­tion threads, whereas it is sim­ple to search one’s own blog posts and comments.

    I thought I was the only one who had noticed that. Face­book is great — per­fect, in fact — for sim­ple declar­a­tive state­ments, from “I’m eat­ing a dou­ble cheese­burger today! [emoti­con, emoti­con, emoti­con]” to “My dog died. [emoti­con, emoti­con, sad-faced emoti­con]” And you might get all those com­ments (or just a few or none — sad-faced emoti­con) affirm­ing your own newsy tid­bits or weigh­ing in on oth­ers’. But if you try to talk in com­plete sen­tences and have a mean­ing­ful dia­logue, you are fight­ing the strong cur­rent of Face­book modal­ity. You’re not sup­posed to have a lot to say or to take very long to say it. You’re sup­posed to get it out there in 25 words or less, let every­one else do the same and stay loose, lim­ber and free to “talk” with hun­dreds of your “friends” every day.

    I feel like a bit of a fuddy-duddy for not lik­ing Face­book. And even more so for being trou­bled by it. But I get con­cerned about what it will do to Gen-Xers and Mil­len­ni­als to be try­ing to say “Whaz­zup??” to the whole world at the expense of ever actu­ally car­ing what’s up with anyone.

    And maybe it’s just one of those things where every gen­er­a­tion thinks the one com­ing after them is putting too much human­ity at risk. My folks weren’t ready for my addic­tion to the boob tube, and yet here I am 30 years later and I hardly watch TV any­more. You do out­grow stuff, even if it takes you longer, and if Face­book and Twit­ter and such are sti­fling some­thing as nec­es­sary as human inter­ac­tion, they’ll prob­a­bly become a lot less inter­est­ing to the gen­er­a­tion being born right now.

    Hey, maybe I should just hold out for that gen­er­a­tion — post-Facebookism. Maybe those guys will want to talk in com­plete sen­tences! I bet­ter keep this blog going until they come online around 2025 or so. [emoti­con, emoticon]

     

     


    Related posts:

    1. Hey, kids, let’s remem­ber our … Face­book Manners
    2. The S-word
    3. Teach­able moments at Hogwarts
    4. Are blogs going to be the next 8-track tapes?
    5. Cul­ture and …

    February 17th, 2012 | Grace | 4 Comments | Tags: ,

4 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 02.17.2012

    Yup. :) :) :)

  • good­book­slady

    Agreed! Woe to the per­son who uses FB as their only form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion! I think it’s great for quick ques­tions, updates, and pho­tos (esp. with those friends who I don’t see often); but I still use my phone, email, snail mail, and face-to-face con­tact with friends and fam­ily as my main form of nur­tur­ing and sus­tain­ing those relationships!

  • Grace

    Hey, you were VERY brief in that com­ment. I think you’re ready for Twitter!

  • Grace

    I think that’s the way to go. If FB sup­ple­ments the rela­tion­ships, it’s all good fun. I don’t know what to make of peo­ple that have hun­dreds of FB friends that they don’t really know in per­son at all. Maybe I’m just not get­ting it, but what’s the point?

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