I deleted Facebook. Not as a some kind of dramatic, political statement (although re-reading Nineteen Eighty-Four a
week ago did nothing to dismiss any paranoia...) and not because I had
been offered a job in the secret service or anything similar; I deleted
Facebook on a whim. A moment of madness.
I'm not
suggesting that the thought of coping without such convenient social
networking at my fingertips is shocking, new or impossible. People
delete their accounts all the time: perhaps after getting a Real Job and
thus becoming a Grown Up, or after forcing themselves to sift through
one too many photos of their Ex. Most people I know who have left the
cult (and to be honest there are only a couple) did it with a slightly
bragging manner (some might say arrogance) to prove that They were
Different, They were Non-conformists, and They were Better than the rest
of us abiding mortals. I, on the other hand, may have just been
slightly fed-up and emotionally exhausted on Valentine's night, and had a
sudden dramatic (I'd like to say 'epiphanic', I should really just
admit to 'silly') moment of panic: an awareness that I spent far too
much time on this bloody website when I should be sleeping, that it was
slowly driving me mad and that my life would be a lot more productive
and happy if I just removed it.
After hitting the
rather well hidden link to "deactivate my account", relief did briefly
wash over me. I shut down my laptop and went straight to sleep. I
ignored the minutely disturbing feeling that came from the awareness
that once having signed up to Facebook, one can never really dispose of
it completely: an account only becomes temporarily invisible, ready for
the day of weakness, which Facebook knows will come, when the
deactivator will return and be welcomed back into the network's
suspicious arms. I suppose my immediate thoughts were the ideas of
finding bliss through ignorance of what my many contacts were and were
not doing in their day to day lives. I just did not need to know.
Of
course I woke up the following morning to remember that I needed to
arrange to meet my presentation group as part of my degree. Facebook was
the easiest way to message each other rather than call or text or
email, because then we would have to communicate one by one to each
other, which would take longer and messages may not be communicated as
well. This was a problem, but I would fix it later.
The
next evening I discovered that my friends were arranging a big night
out, and the easiest way to discuss this of course, was on Facebook. I
was out of the loop, and had to learn such information through a
combination of people.
In just under two weeks I will
be visiting some friends at a different University. My lack of social
networking means that I am no longer up to date with the weekend's
plans. Rather than call each person individually to be updated on
travelling matters, I will inevitably re-activate Facebook to make my
life a lot easier.
The upshot of all this, is that
Facebook is not an absolute necessity and of course most sociably active
people could survive rather well without it if they chose to. It is
part of human nature to drift away from, and lose contact with some
people in our lives, and make the effort to keep in contact with our
closest friends through calling, texting and meeting up. But the real
reason that nearly all young people have Facebook is to make all that
communication faster and easier. I do get hugely irritated by
pretentious social experimenters, Guardian columnists and the
like, who scoff and despair at my generation for being so dependant on
social networks. Yes, Facebook is bloody annoying and some people do
take their use of it too far, but like all advances in technology,
people will adapt to using things like Facebook to make their life
easier and to gain further awareness about how the modern world is
developing. The only thing I have gained by not using it in the last few
days is a few minutes extra time in my day. Minutes which have most
probably been used up by other silly activities such as watching
programmes about obese families and writing this blog... so don't judge
me for wanting it back.
