Quitting Facebook and Signing Back Up to Life

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: PRESSES, MAGAZINES, AND COLLECTIONS SEEKING POETRY, PROSE, AND ART - CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS

RSS Archive

Unlike most writers, Rohin Guha is not terribly afraid of pop music. In fact, he pens the Pop For Skeptics column for Flavorwire. He also does a bit of online content production and social media development and if you want his help on that, go here for more details. This is his vanity blog. He would love to hear from you. Honest.

DANCE TO THE BEATS OF MY DRUM: Advice, Art, Bollywood, Gardening, Lana Del Rey, Lit, Movies, Music, Social Media

SPOTLIGHT: Songs With Ladies Dropping F-Bombs, 2012: The Year of the Outsider, Quitting Facebook & Signing Back Up to Life, An Open Letter to the Ladies In My Life Over the Years

@ohrohin email CV What's on your mind?

December 14, 2011

Quitting Facebook and Signing Back Up to Life

I noticed that most people were failing in having basic conversations so I deactivated my Facebook profile sometime earlier this year, in March. Conversations about the weather, about the indiscretions of vague acquaintances had all become preceded by the qualifier, “Did you see on Facebook that…?” My best friends and I suddenly had nothing to talk about, no reason to meet for a coffee, no reason to host dinner parties. I mean, if we were already witnessing each others’ thoughts crystallizing in real-time, then what use was it to meet for coffee? A physical presence amounted to awkward silences. Facebook was stunting actual interpersonal communication.

What unnerves me further is the devaluing of private, personal moments. People’s weddings, birthdays, baby announcements—these used to be momentous occasions that merited breaking the bank to mail out elaborate invitations. These invitations could be documented in a scrapbook or put away into an old shoebox. There is a narrative that was accessible at your fingertips even if you spilled water across the medium. That spilled water would somehow become part of the narrative. Even the beginnings and endings of relationships—these are histories that unless we were told specifically, we didn’t have access to and Facebook has become a town square for everyone to broadcast their business, bowel movement to break-up.

Deeply personal information has to be earned. Most relationships and friendships have to be earned. The ability to add and remove friends on Facebook has killed the idea of an earned relationship. I am learning things about my best friends all the time and that earned discovery is like the meat of any successful relationship. You can’t just be handed people’s most intimate details on a silver platter. You won’t appreciate it. You won’t appreciate them.

But further, something that terrifies me is that entire generations are now growing up feeling commodified. Facebook has successfully ramped up the commodification of everyday human beings. Facebook is this hulking marketing engine that people use to try to speak louder than everyone else. I always refer to George Saunders’ “The Braindead Megaphone”: Everyone is yelling and nobody is listening. Well, one entity is listening and they’re listening well. People may not be snowflakes, but let’s not diminish them to a matrix of tastes prepared for marketers.

People are unwittingly entering aspects of their personal lives into an elaborate form on Facebook’s platform: Name, age, sexual orientation, cultural tastes, socioeconomic background, lineage, class; you can try to outsmart Facebook and leave a field blank, but then a single uploaded photograph can betray whatever information you were attempting to omit. I don’t mind Twitter or Tumblr because a fair amount of digging has to go into researching any targets: It’s earned information.

A couple of my friends are purists: They never signed up for Facebook. One was afraid of creepy guys stalking her and the other just patently rejected the idea of needing to join an enclosed medium in order to continue fostering her friendships. To their credits, both were fairly correct.

But the remarkable thing about parting ways with Facebook has been the amount of time that has become available suddenly. No longer do I feel bound to the platform by FOMO anxiety, but I feel free to actually work on projects, complete stories, and, yes, watch all the King of the Hill repeats on Netflix humanly possible.

Should I ever get married, I’m sure I’ll post a picture of a sad-looking slice of wedding cake here on Tumblr and leave all the guesswork up to my readers.