Once again, I’ve decided to deactivate my Facebook account. While my friends are quick to say “yeah whatever … you’ll be back”, I’ve been having a tough time justifying the need for Facebook. When someone who doesn’t have a facebook account asks me “Hey should I get a Facebook account?” my quick and default reply is “You don’t have one?! You need to get on Facebook”. Then I quickly ask myself .. why should they? Well let’s take a look:

Possible reasons you can recommend signing up for Facebook:
1) Reuniting with high school and college friends as well as other personal connections
2) Sharing pictures and videos with your friends and family
3) Building your social network for career opportunities
4) Creating and inviting friends to events
5) Sharing your personal contact info
6) Creating and joining common interest groups

(I can’t think of any more reasons at the moment so please add some reasons in the comments. I honestly want to dissect this thing)

Onward!

A successful visit to any website is one where you are able to obtain useful information to use in your own life. Think about any website you go to really often. They typically contain something that is useful to you or at least entertaining. Whether it be your online banking site, research on google, youtube videos … you always get something out of it. That said, we can even measure how successful a visit to a site is by gauging how satisfied we feel when we close the lid on our laptops at night. While I could almost categorize this as mildly entertaining: looking at pictures of my college roommate’s ex-girlfriend totally trashed and drunk does not constitute useful information. I’ve found that this kind of stimulus just adds noise to my life and this is the problem I have with social networking sites like Facebook. We’ve rounded up all of these users and now everyone is just looking at each other with nothing to do and nothing important to say.

” So iamnotrobot what do you when you are sitting at your computer?? I don’t know any other websites besides Facebook, Myspace, and Google. What am I to do?!?! ”

Well, never fear. When I first deactivated my facebook account, I had some withdrawal symptoms for sure. I would occassional type in http://facebo – and then remember I no longer had an active account. I didn’t even know why I was opening a browser and mechanically typing in the address. I needed something to cure the addiction …

Soon thereafter I started scouring the interwebs for useful and/or entertaining content. After many months of use I believe a good way to ween yourself from the Facebook black whole is to use a service like StumbleUpon. You can specify types of websites you’d like to see and StumbleUpon will somewhat randomly direct you to a website you might find interesting. You can even thumb up or thumb down any site which StumbleUpon comes across. These ratings are then shared back with the entire Stumble community which leads to better a ‘stumbling’ experience. In essence, whenever I feel the urge to go on Facebook and waste some time, I stumble across a few websites instead. If we’re not already friends on StumbleUpond, check out my stumbles and add me as friend. If we’re not already friends on StumbleUpon, check out my stumbles and add me as friend. Make sure you get the FireFox plugin or the Safari plugin.

The wasted time once occupied by Facebook is now replaced by short StumbleUpon sessions. More Better!!

With all that said, I think these Facebook vacations are key. They fill in the various space-out moments we have in the day with something other than staring at pictures and comments about stupid shows.

So many of you enjoyed listening to me rant about how much I despise Facebook (and trust me I still do), but I have indeed reactivated my account. There are several reasons why I chose to do this:

1. My Nephew – My 1.6 year old nephew is growing faster than anyone can believe. Unfortunantely being 3000 miles away does not allow me to see him as often as I would like. My sister posts about a million pictures a week of him on Facebook and its the easiest way for me to see the progression. That said, I’ve still have a travel budget to allow me to see him at least a few times year.

2. Jobs – Not necessarily for me, but my Dad got laid off recently. It’s kinda hard to think that for the entire time I’ve been alive my dad has held the same job. A few weeks ago, on the eve of Christmas, my dad was quietly laid-off. So for the first time in 25 years, my dad is looking for a job and I plan to help him in any way I can. Specifically, knowing anyone who knows someone who knows someone who knows of a job for my dad may be helpful.

3. You guys – While I tried to remain in contact with many of you via non-facebook methods, it was still difficult. My twitter usage went up which is good because Twitter takes up less of my time then Facebook, but its not the same info you can share on FB. Although, there was no disruption in communication with any of my really close friends, a few others missed out on a few things I was up to and likewise.

4. The 2009 Music Drive – Last year I barely worked on any music projects and I won’t let that happen again. This year I’ll be writing/recording a lot more and I plan to share everything with you all.

Facebook Rehab Observations:
So even though I’m “back” on facebook, I’d like to state that a few things I had said in my last post still hold true. First, I’m still upset that people don’t talk to each other in real life anymore. It’s quite the bummer really. People like to go out and still remain in their bubble. I believe this is a social side effect of how we behave in the online world and it has unfortunately invaded reality! Second, social networking in real life is much more powerful and beneficial. In the last 45 days I’ve met more interesting people then the 5 odd years I’ve had on Facebook. Essentially for the last 45 days my life has felt like the scene below:

In my 45 day-no-facebook-vacation, I learned a lot. There are very specific reasons why I’ve decided to re-activate my facebook account but I still don’t like it. I think if you are using it for pure “communication” and meeting new people I think there are better ways than Facebook. Use email and go outside if you want to do that. If you are using it for sharing content with your friends and loved ones, then I think its decent. There are more personal ways of sharing content but “I guess this will do.”

Unfortunately, the more we try to complicate communication this less we’ll communicate. Take for example, Myspace’s new user verification procedure you must use every time you log-in:

Um, I don’t know about you but I’m not going to log into a site where I have to verify whether or not I’m a human or a robot every time. That is lame. So maybe I’ll log into my myspace music account every two or three months now. Thanks!

Regardless, I really recommend the Facebook vacation. It’s really healthy and I feel a lot better about everything after this. Perhaps, at the end of 2009 I’ll do the same thing again. It’s a great way to check-in with reality.

This is just a super short update letting you know that in the course of 24 hours since I’ve deleted my facebook account, I’ve typed “www.face……” at least ten times in the address bar. For absolutely no apparent reason, I will randomly open a new blank Safari window and start navigating to facebook. Talk about human conditioning. Hopefully in the next day or so I’ll stop doing that and start finding new websites I’ve never seen before. Stay tuned for any good finds.

Today, November 11th, 2008, I have decided to delete my facebook account. Yes it is true. I honestly can not remember the last time I learned something useful or connected with someone that I REALLY wanted to on facebook. Having a roster of “friends” I didn’t talk to in high school or college, doesn’t really help me. The very few friends I communicate with, will call me on my cell phone or visit me in person if they really are a friend. The social networking sites of today have literally stripped young people of their social skills. It has also created an ego-driven feedback loop where people strive to have more “friends” and appear cooler than their peers. It has also given birth to a new addiction that in its strive to bring people together, drives them further apart.

There are many arguments about the benefits of social networking sites. For example, if you live far away from the people you “know” you may justify the use of Facebook to keep in touch. The only problem with that is. Well … are you really keeping in touch? If anything you are further away or removed from that person than you could ever be. The person you think you are keeping up to date with may even have you as the furthest thought buried in the back of their minds. In essence, you create an imaginary world where you feel as if people REALLY want to be associated with you. 

According to a book I read a few months ago, Love is the Killer App by Tim Sanders, you need to go above and beyond the simple act of “friending” someone on a social networking site if this is your means of “networking”. You really need to connect with that person on a deeper level. Otherwise, you are just adding noise and distractions to your true networking potential. Your REAL-LIFE networking potential.

Wake up. Interact with the people around you. The next wave of Social Networking (Web 3.0-Non Internet Edition) will come about when the social networking of today is so overrun with advertisements that you can’t even read profiles anymore. It will come about when you feel the need to buy products you otherwise wouldn’t think twice about. It will come about when your personal information is captured by indexing software and used for highly sophisticated and precise background checks. It will come about when the feeling of isolation and loneliness is so powerful in our society that we are forced to actually make eye contact with one another.

Here is a collection of interesting Facebook videos:

 

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Related Article and Discussion found on Tech Crunch, here.
FB image taken from here