I came home the other night after going out and had something on my mind and it was Facebook. Facebook was the last thing I should have had on my mind. I should have been dreaming but instead I was logging in and deleting all of my photos from the service and the other silly posts that compose it. Doing this had been on my mind since the launch of the re-designed user interface. It was though the service I had been using had become a completely new person and I needed to break up with it. My fling with Facebook ended at 4:45 on an early Monday morning.
I must admit that the re-design of the service was not my only reason for ending it with Facebook since I had plenty of other reasons to file for divorce. I never loved it that much to begin with because something about it just seems not right, at least to my expanding gut. It bothers me that people wish to put so much of their lives on the Internet for some sort of validation or ego boost. I don't need that validation and I don't think people are getting healthy validation from it anyway.
I never understood all the silly applications that people use to send pieces of flair, smiles, green beer, and dumb time wasting pieces of digital garbage. I was done ignoring or accepting these things, filling out trivial questionnaires and everything else. I do not care about reading your answers so why should I assume that you will care enough to read mine? Maybe I do not want to share that information with you or any of my other FB friends. There are such things as discretion and privacy even in the modern digital, over-sharing world that we live in today.
It seems that FB has mostly two types of users. One that is all about telling you every single move they make in their daily lives from what they just ate or where they are on the face of the planet. FB like Twitter is some form of voluntary GPS tracking device that attracts people with low self-esteem. I mean there is sharing and then there is over-sharing. That type of user is needing constant attention and probably has issues with being self-absorbed. The other type of user is one that is stuck in their past wanting to relive their sad glory days from high school or college because they never made it anywhere in life beyond those times. I am not the same person I was in high school and I hope you are not either. People should change, grow, mature and learn that the past is better left in the past. These are two types of people that I honestly don't like so why would I want to be friends with them on the service or know them in real life?
If I know you in real life then you already have my phone number, been to my apartment, I see you regularly and we do things together. So if you want to contact me then call me and see what is going on like real people or real friends do. I don't want a meaningless piece of flair to add to my profile, instead let's go hang out at the park or go have a face to face conversation over a drink. That is true human interaction, not posting comments on a person's photo like, "OMG I can't believe you still look so young."
Facebook it came down to this: I am just not that into you. It seems that you want to know too much about me and will not give me enough personal space. You want to give me tacky presents and make me feel cheap. I will flirt with Myspace for the moments when I need to over-share on its basic entry-level interface. That is where I will go in the middle of the night to make my drunken updates or just say good morning to the Internet. At least there I can play music on my profile, customize it to the point of consuming all of your computer's memory and be friends with perfectly good strangers that don't need to comment on their every last move. Hell, I am even friends with Madonna on Myspace. Facebook can you do that?
Posts
