Thoughtcrime

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.