Why am I not on Facebook anymore?

G'day!

I've deleted my personal Facebook account. It's been a month so far and it feels like a giant weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I kid you not. Lost time restored. Privacy and anonymity somewhat restored. Head space finally for my increasingly over-informed and addled mind along with a retrieved creative zest for life.

As a highly distractible sometimes screen addict with a desire to preserve my grey matter, the preachings of Susan Greenfield and Nicholas Carr have always struck a chord with me but as far as this most recent decision there is no end of material online to steel oneself as I encountered on the way to my self-enforced exile from Facebook:

https://oncletom.io/2016/facebook/

Then a couple of days after deleting the account...

(watch if you have an 8-16yo especially)

Anything and everything by Sherry Turkle

Four Corners report on Facebook

Why I'm not on Facebook documentary trailer

And what was the catalyst for the deletion? 

Quite probably no-one except me would have noticed but recently I clocked up my 10 year anniversary on Facebook. My 10th anniversary as a user was celebrated by Facebook sending me yet another one of their corny, randomly generated memories-in-one-minute videos. That in itself was probably a red rag to the bull that is the videomaker in me. How dare they take what I do and then automate it into something they call meaningful? Hey Facebook, why don't you let the user select their own memorable moments of their highlights reel?!

I looked at this memento not with joy but aghast. Have I really been strapped into this platform for 10 years? What value has it brought me? Has it taken away or added to my life's experiences? Sure it's helped me reunite with old friends, workmates and school friends. It's also helped me stay in touch with a large number of "friends and workmates" for TEN years and a portion of those relationships would have mutually well and truly ceased in the days before Facebook existed. Yes we can "unfriend" and I know people who do but it feels anti-social and I'm sure that's all part of the platform engineering. How many friends do you need? 

By investing time into this system I had created something I now needed to maintain and energy was spent thinking about who should see what on my profile. Nieces and nephews, potential employers and clients and people I didn't know so well needed to be put in a separate list. Surely there were better things to do with one's life, like go out and enjoy life itself. 

Having been in the IT industry for a good chunk of my working life I was always an early adopter of a lot of new instant messaging tools that came along (e.g. icq...anyone old enough to remember that?) but Facebook was different. It was a chronicle of everything some of which, in the old school days, I would never have considered sharing en masse and it was being stored and replicated on someone else's system not by my bedside table like a paper diary and not in my bookcase like my photo albums of yore. It was essentially visible not just to my haphazardly secured friends list but to a whole bunch of strangers who maintain the Facebook platform and that makes me very uncomfortable. What if the rules around content storage and privacy change down the track?

Way back when, I was one of the first employees to have daily legitimate time on the Internet and on message boards for export trade (and I still remember the visiting salesman who said to me "oh that world wide web thing will never catch on"). Heck our honeymoon was purchased online back in the day when no-one did that (and it was scary!) and our entire first baby's setup was all E-bay purchases and he's a teenager now. Leaping at my pals's invitations to join FB, I was also the next one in line trying to lure folk to sign up for a Facebook account. In hindsight I should have listened to those who resisted and complained, "Oh, I don't have time for doing that", "I would get lost in something like that", "I really don't understand why my workmate is on it all day". 

To date I am enjoying the hiatus and to be frank I'm not sure how long I'll last without Facebook but so far so good. It'll be interesting to see how much real life it has supplanted after all. So, henceforth, hit me up the old school way. Send me an e-mail (it's on my webpage) or ring me (I'm in the whitepages) or text me or write me (my snail-mailing friends) or just visit us like you've been promising to do (you know there's room to stay here). I'd love to have a normal, human exchange in a real world environment.

Ciao for now,

💖

Anna Bananna
NTS: Channel Seth next time Anna, channel Seth!