Note, 11/25/09: The unfortunate reality is that planning activities with multiple people is extremely difficult without the use of a social networking framework. For this reason alone, I have decided to re-open a Facebook account. However, my views on social networking’s long-term effects on privacy have not changed. I suppose the experiment was not a failure, but the fact is that the way people communicate in the 21st century has evolved; some things have changed for the better, and other things for the worse.
Recently I closed my Facebook and Twitter accounts. I didn’t plan on mentioning it since I didn’t think anyone would notice; however, some people have been wondering why I did it, so let me explain my reasons for jumping ship.
In the new 2.0 culture that we live in, über-transparency is an accepted way of life–in fact, it’s a socially acceptable addiction. Every thought that goes through our head is tweeted, things that were once considered private are openly shared between complete strangers on a global electronic billboard, and life itself has been reduced to almost nothing more than a constant stream of status updates. Maybe that’s a little extreme, but you get the idea.
The popularity of services like Facebook and Twitter stems from a basic human desire: the craving to be seen and appreciated. Today’s online social networking applications facilitate instant communications on a mass scale, allowing individuals to feed their cravings to be noticed like beggars at a feast. Unfortunately, the depth of interaction that occurs between individuals within most social networking frameworks does not and cannot fulfill our deep social and emotional needs. Although we may have 1,000 “friends” on Facebook and can chat with a dozen people at any given time, the reality is that a day spent on Facebook will often leave you emotionally dry and socially bankrupt. Facebook and Twitter sold themselves to us by making “socializing” easy, but all they’ve done is made us victims to “easy” relationships.
The phrase “easy relationships” is a sad oxymoron–serious, meaningful relationships are never easy, and being someone’s friend means more than sharing a superficial affiliation on an electronic network. When we confuse acquaintances with friends, it subconsciously affects the way we view and interact with people and the world around us. The reality is that most of the people on our friends lists are not really our friends, and some of us spend more time on the Internet than with the people we know. One of the hallmarks of true friendship is intimate, meaningful communication, and this is lost when we reduce our inner thoughts and feelings to one-line status updates that are broadcast to everyone in the world.
Have you ever considered that Facebook and Twitter are the two largest social conditioning and data-mining applications ever created? These applications make it easy for individuals to commoditize for the corporations, freely and without concern, their feelings, thoughts, interests and relationships – we blindly give away our most personal information through the social networking matrix, even though we would object if the same information were gleaned from us unwittingly. Privacy is arguably the single most valuable remaining right that we have in this country, especially in an age where the government, social trends and identity theft threatens to undermine our ability to keep ourselves to ourselves–and yet, ironically, privacy is non-existent today primarily because we have vanquished it with our own hands and fingers. We are only now beginning to realize the true depths of the intellectual and social theft that we have perpetrated against ourselves.
There are too many things happening in my life that cannot be condensed into a one-line sentence; even multiple pages of information on this blog could never express the feelings inside of me. Some things can only be communicated through looking into someone’s eyes; feeling the tension of an uneasy silence; hearing the emotions of another human being coming through his or her voice–these are things we’ve lost in the 2.0 culture. In light of this, I have decided to temporarily close my Facebook and Twitter accounts. Call it an experiment in social networking 1.0–where a face-to-face conversation replaces the chat box, and a telephone call replaces leaving messages on my friends’ walls. I understand that there are benefits to social networking that sometimes balance the cons, and I appreciate them. However, I don’t want to continue being sucked into the 2.0 culture, because I’m a human being–not a 140-character status update.
I closed my f acct b/c it sux. Incredibly self serving.