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Facebook - Worth Quitting

A lot of my family and friends might have realised at some point in the past month or two that I’ve quit Facebook. Those who I speak to in person – i.e. my actual friends – will know my reasons why. Those of you who I haven’t spoken to, or the interested web visitor can discover my Five Reasons Why I Dropped Facebook below:

1. Friend requests from people I don’t really like - People from my past started resurfacing, which, in a lot of cases was nice, for a brief catch-up. However, once that initial moment of contact had been made, and we had caught up, it became apparent why we had lost contact in the first place: we weren’t really friends. When people who I actually disliked started making friend requests, it became a dilemma as simply hitting “ignore” did not seem to do the job. The final straw? Maybe when someone asked me “Why do you keep rejecting my friend requests on Facebook?” when I was on a visit to my old hometown, to which I had to answer, “well, maybe its because we’re not friends” the fact that this was asked at a funeral (I shit you not) did not help.

2. Photographs you’d rather forget – What is it with people banging photos straight on Facebook after a night out or a party. I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want to do when nursing a hangover is look at pictures of how drunk I was the night before. Not only that, but some sad-acts actually go around taking these pictures on the night out rather than actually enjoying themselves. Sometimes they even say “this’ll look great on Facebook” immediately before I stick my middle finger up at their lense. That’s a picture I don’t need to be ‘tagged’ in, thanks.

3. Hearing (reading) things that (should) have been said behind your back - Now I’m not sure this one is applicable to everyone, but, on more than one occassion, I have read someone else’s opinion of me in some part of Facebook or another – i.e. on someone’s wall or in a photo comment (see above!) or something – that was less than complimentary. If I wanted to listen to negative sentiments about myself I’d start approving all the comments we receive here. Some people say “If you’ve got something to say about me, say it to my face!” I say “If you’ve got something to say about me behind my back, make sure I can’t find it on Facebook, you clown.” Reading stuff other people have written about you doesn’t feel too good, especially when it is a criticism.

4. Those numerous applications – OK, I know when I went to quit, Facebook tried to lure me back saying “you can turn them off, you know!” but please, for the mother of all that is holy, can someone explain to me what we all did for entertainment before we joined Facebook and “started biting chumps”. Actually, scratch that, I just remembered: we went out of our houses, with our friends, and did things.

5. Facebook Advertising – you knew it was coming when they turned down that ludicrously high offer from the Google Gods, right? Facebook advertising is the worst sort of advertising, it disects our interests and demographic and targets US personally. You learn a lot about yourself by the ads Facebook targets you with. Thanks to Facebook ads, I now feel like some sort of gambling addicted alcoholic party animal who spends all day waiting to sign up to Sky TV (with a TESCOs voucher, of course). I mean, they aren’t far off the mark, but none of us need telling this stuff, do we?

Lastly, what’s the point of it all? Social networking seems so great until you realise that it is basically just mimicking normal community behaviour. That’s what sociopaths do: mimick normal human behaviour, rather than actually having a personality. Get involved with an actual community of people, rather than draining hours of time into something which will achieve actually zero. I haven’t even started on those groups that we all join about some ’cause’ or other (i.e. ’1 million people think that crime is badder than doing right good nice charity things’ groups) – making or joining a Facebook Group does not a legitimate protest (or even point) make.

Rob has joined the “I quit Facebook a month or two ago and actually the sky didn’t fall in!” group – he thoroughly recommends it to all.

Oh, and actually, all of the above contributed to my main reason for leaving Facebook:

Facebook Made Me Feel Bad

If something keeps leaving you feeling worse than you did before, then you should probably stop doing it.