It turns out people leave Facebook the same way they lived Facebook: with lots and lots of sharing.
Artist Man Bartlett posted a blog earlier this week called "Why I Deleted My Facebook Account," which marks the latest installment in the burgeoning genre of Facebook-quitter confessionals. Call them the de-Facement diaries.
Usually when we decide to stop doing something online, we just stop. We unplug, we close the window, delete the app, or just never come back. But like a four-year relationship that suddenly bites the dust, leaving Facebook apparently merits an exegesis of what went wrong and why. And just like a messy, acrimonious breakup, it's always, "It's not me, it's you.
Bartlett's tell-all follows the same narrative arc as previous accounts of "de-Facing" as other masters of the genre, such as the New Yorker's Steve Coll, the New York Observer's Elise Knutsen, and The Daily contributor Sean Bonner, whose tell-all treatises on leaving Facebook all appeared within days of each other (and Facebook's public offering) in May. A rash of them also appeared in February on the heels of Facebook announcing its plans to go public, including "What I Learned When I Quit Facebook" in The Daily Muse, "Why I Quit Facebook, and Why You Ought to Join Me" in PolicyMic, and "Why I Quit Facebook" in the New York Post.
The tales of social de-networking read like self-help books: I thought I was happy, but I was hurting myself and others around me. Here's how I got better and you can, too. They also imply that leaving Facebook is something surprising and bold. And two years ago, when a handful of techie early adopter-types became Facebook's early defectors, perhaps it was.
But these days, discontent with Facebook seems more the rule than the exception. More than a third of Facebook users are spending less time on the site now than they were six months ago, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found, and Facebook's U.S. user growth rate in April was the smallest ever since comScore started tracking the figure four years ago. Even Sean Parker, Facebook's first president and an early investor in the company, said he feels "somewhat bored" by the social network.
A love letter to Facebook would be a bigger surprise than seeing another "Dear John" letter detailing the social network's flaws, and the uptick in these tell-alls means they increasingly draw eye-rolls from the Internet.
"Top indicator that yr a precious doof: u write grandiose article abt how u quit Facebook," tweeted Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall, his hashtag an abbreviation for "who the f--k cares."
I'd counter that it isn't that no one cares -- people post all kinds of things to the Internet every day that we care nothing about. Instead, our response to the list of grievances outlined by authors like Coll, Bartlett and Knutsen is often an exasperated, "We know." Reading about their concerns with Facebook's respect (or lack thereof) for personal information feels like being told Exxon isn't doing enough to help wildlife. We get it. What else is new?
So why do people leave? Lack of trust, mostly -- a sense that Facebook can't be depended on to protect our personal information and will sell us out to make a buck. We are its greatest asset, but what Facebook does with us and our identities online is entirely beyond our control, the authors of these quitter confessionals argue. Facebook helped their case just a few weeks ago when it automatically updated members' profile pages to show the addresses of their Facebook email accounts. The only way to avoid having the information featured was to take it down after Facebook put it up.
The issue for the social networking site is whether this tension between public and private, and people and profits, can ever be resolved. Clearly, hundreds of millions of users aren't too bothered by it.
But as the tell-alls show, users' doubts haven't been put to rest, and if anything have been reawakened by all of the coverage concerning Facebook's need to make money. Their public offering put a dollar figure on our personal data that the citizens of the social network aren't soon going to forget, especially when each quarter will bring a new financial statement with an updated estimate of what we're worth.
Since its privacy meltdown two years ago, the company has tried to be on its best behavior, revamping its privacy settings to allow for more control, weeding out confusing legalese from its terms of use, and publicizing its safety measures. Yet just as Facebook ensures that our own indiscretions go unforgotten, Facebook may find that getting the rest of us to forgive and forget is harder than it had hoped.
Follow Bianca Bosker on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bbosker
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Speaking for myself, since leaving Facebook, I have found that my life has improved greatly. I have more time to spend on my life and the pursuits that I once loved. I am glad to have left it all behind. http://www.facebookdetox.com
And THEN I WILL QUIT FACEBOOK.
I like your kids, and I am a godmother to a few, but just because you have had one doesn't mean I need to keep up with "little Bella’s or Simons first poo" or "Maybe I am biased but aren't these green lines scratched onto a piece of paper the most creative you have ever seen" nonsense. It just feels like a bloody day care center sometimes, I miss my friends who used to have something interesting to say.
Another reason is the privacy and over five years I have had this account I don't feel the need to divulge as much of my personal life as did before. I have also started feeling as if it is a supremely narcissistic tool and just wanted some time without a sensory overload, waiting for people to like my updates, needing people to like my updates, trying to create an artificial image to project. I have just deactivated not deleted, who knows maybe I will be back, but for now just enjoying the freedom. I didn’t feel the need to tell anyone other than my husband and my two closest friends (which is kid of weird if you have over 300 “friends” on Facebook?) So anyway, off to do some more baking, making long arbitrary comments on any other social self-expression format and take my poor long-suffering well exercised hound out for another walk!
I just deactivated my account 7 days ago, and actually, I am feeling kind of alright! Sweaty palms and anxious thoughts the first 48 hours. I sent long rambling emails to friends and was beside myself the first the few mornings, wondering what do or what George Takei had been up to (oh my). So after doing a substantial amount of baking, catching up current affairs (WTF we need to sort out this crap in Syria!) and taking the dog for many walks, I feel as if I am over the worst of the veritable cold-turkey of my rather spontaneous decision.
My reasons for deactivating were a few. In August this year I would have had the account for 5 years, and I wanted to go back to a simpler time before Facebook.
I am happily married and not able to have children and I am entirely at the peace with this...However, the month by month shots of swelling bellies, the "creative" artistic sepia shots of huge boobs, artfully styled and let's face it, slightly ill at ease looking husbands/partners, smiling sheet-draped mothers having caesareans or actual umbilical cords and look at my awesome child with chocolate all over her/his face, just started to annoy me.
Artistic expression is what the old Myspace was all about until banksters took over the place. Banksters were always in control of Facebook from the get go. Call it Banksterbook!
Wattpad would work if it had a more complex form of classification for its poems and short storied. A poem has structure as well as content. A perfectly rhyming poem is easily lost among all those poems that don't rhyme, and there are over a hundred ways to rhyme a poem using meter.
I no longer see the point, not that I (really) ever did..
I think that many of us just joined because it seemed like everyone we knew was..but the truth is, little communication occurred, just a series of "I did this...I did that" without much in the way of give and take..kinda pointless, really..
And no, not Tweeting either...
Facebook isn't the problem - it's the people using it that are.