Why I’m deleting my Facebook Account
Prologue
It’s late December, 2011. The emergence of the new is everywhere. Scientists are on the verge of discovering the elusive Higgs Boson particle. The world is changing fast and we’re about to enter a new year. 2012 will be a Presidential election year in the US which always packs extra gravity here and that energy reverberates across the broader global consciousness. I’m a forward-thinking member of “GenX.” I work in new media and education. I’ve accepted my GenX label with a shrug and an almost-too-on-the-nose “whatever.”
And amid all this, I’m an ambivalent non-active-user of social media. On the one hand, it’s clearly being used as a tool by advertisers and corporations seeking to monetize our “eyeballs.” On the other, it’s a way to connect with folks I might not engage with much otherwise and to learn what adopters are experiencing. As someone with aspirations for a long and fruitful career in media and learning, I am experiencing a newly coined phenomena called “FOMO” or the Fear of Missing Out. Opting out of something without ever opting in seems like a bad idea in this case. No conceptual or academic understanding of media can match direct experience. If, as Marshall McCluhan famously put it, “the medium is the message,” the best way to grok the message of social media is to engage in the medium.
My Social Year
I’ve always loved New Years with its potential for reinvention. With this mindset, I began 2012 with a single primary resolution: “To Engage with Social Media.” What I’d later refer to as “My Social Year” began on January 1st, 2012.
As an aside, I would encourage taking advantage of New Years resolutions to explore these types of exercises in behavioral change. As Daniel Pink’s recent book When outlines, new years are excellent times to effect new practices and routines. Beginning milestones allow for reinvention. New habits can be formed. Old habits jettisoned. It was with this spirit of innovation and sense of reinvention squarely in mind, that I dove into social media as a recovering GenX skeptic.
It took some force of will to switch my social tactics. I’d only dabbled up with social platforms until then —tentatively dipping my toe in the water; creating accounts; lurking on occasion; watching the growing streams of Facebook and Twitter flow by but never really diving in. I’d post on occasion, but with caution and infrequently. My healthy mistrust of these media paired nicely with my tendency towards privacy and introversion.
In the beginning, engaging was an enormously positive experience. I found myself expanding my understanding of digital media on a personal level. I’ve long rejected the notion that the new is the exclusive provenance of the young, and this was my chance to experiment with that notion, using myself as a subject. I found new connections, developed new habits and practices, and broadened my sense of myself and the emerging world around me. What was once a passing interest in travel and photography suddenly became a more core aspect of how I engaged the digital world through platforms like Foursquare and Instagram. The images in my digital photostreams serve to this day as memory aids and means of keeping my past front and center in my understanding of the present. I’ve always loved to write and soon after leaning into Facebook, I could exchange digital missives with friends and connections in a semipublic forum that was open to new inputs and engagements. It was all exciting and new.
And my primary point of entry to my newfound social world was Facebook. My root key into the emerging digital universe of social media was the friendly white F on a blue background. And more and more it was glimmering red with new notifications. As I write this I can almost feel the surge of dopamine from that feedback.
The Middle Years
After my social year of 2012 passed, I continued much of my personal engagement with new media. My plans to write a book called My Social Year never quite got off the ground. In retrospect, had I built a hiatus into the beginning of 2013, I might’ve knocked it out, but instead I just continued to lean in. My idle time became social media time.
What I like about successful New Years Resolutions is that when they take hold, they stop being resolutions and instead become engrained habits in your life. This was certainly true of social media. I was on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram daily. I chronicled my visits to coffee shops and restaurants by checking in on Foursquare or Facebook with a quick photo share, and soon I was filling up the feeds of my friends and connections with random thoughts and images. It was all mildly enjoyable and enormously addictive. When bored I could browse back through my feed and reminisce. This reinforced my memories and frankly fed my growing narcissism. Ah Facebook, you sweet extension of my self…
A word of caution here — New Years resolutions can transform your behavior, but it’s not always 100% positive. The intent that goes into the resolution year one should be reassessed each year with ample room for editing and adjustment along the way. As Jeff Bezos puts it “many decisions are reversible, two-way doors.” Keep that in mind when engaging in behavior-changing resolutions. Reserve the right to back out entirely, or at least tweak or adjust based on what you learn.
Darkening Clouds
In the intervening years, I continued to use social media. Oddly over time I began to feel less connected. This was especially true of Facebook. Perhaps the novelty was wearing off. My time spent there felt increasingly insular and too transparently inauthentic and ripe for manipulation by bad actors. As a critical thinker, I became troubled by the fact that I was building what seemed to be deep and meaningful connections on a platform built primarily for advertising and profit. It was becoming tempting to blur the lines between who I am and what I share. Was what I shared really who I was? Was any positive response really a reflection of my value or self-worth? I began sharing a bit less, pulling back and thinking critically about it a bit more.
When Facebook Live launched in 2015 I got excited again as I thought through it’s potential applications to learning. At the same time, I became increasingly concerned by the hoaxes and spam that I was beginning to see with more frequency in my feed. “Fake News” wasn’t quite yet a thing, but the darker side of social began to become apparent. It was right around this time that in my work we began testing free live streaming test prep sessions and I saw first-hand the dangers of online trolls who were looking for big streams to hijack to share their incendiary world views. While I was able to vanquish the trolls, I never forgot how unsafe a place the Internet and social media could be. Even friends who I’d been close to in face to face contexts began sharing more opinionated and provocative posts. At first I responded to try to find room for discourse. More and more I pulled back from posting or responding as my emotional reaction continued to feel somehow off. This was true even when I agreed with the posts I was reading.
The 2016 Election
Then the 2016 election season happened. I remember feeling deeply troubled by my feed heading into the election, and like many of us, I was profoundly surprised by the outcome. I felt oddly blindsided (in large part by social media). For the first time since 2012, I decided to take more assertive action with my media habits.
Beginning in November of 2016, I took my first hiatus from Facebook. From roughly November 2016 until March of 2017, I took a break. I didn’t quit social media, just Facebook. During this period I stayed engaged on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Generally speaking, I preferred more open, public platforms like Twitter and Instagram to the more insular dynamics of Facebook. Engagement or feedback there felt more earned like listeners to a speaker in a medieval public square.
When I wanted a more direct way to engage with my personal network, LinkedIn served as my Facebook replacement. While it was similarly insular, it’s frame was professional and transactional, like a non-stop networking event. The time I spent on LinkedIn was in service of advancing my career and growing my professional network. I had a much harder time rationalizing the time I was spending on Facebook. What was I gaining, when the costs were becoming clear.
When I returned to Facebook in March of 2017, it felt increasingly politicized. Rather than seeking out ways to engage diverse views, it felt like a place to seek reinforcement from folks with similar perspectives. I no longer trusted it as a place to get reliable information. While it was an excellent tool to stay connected to my weaker ties, the items on the Cons side of my Pros and Cons ledger were beginning to add up.
By late 2017, I was regularly reading articles in The Guardian and Tech Crunch about the attention economy. I was thinking through the importance of teaching digital citizenship to children (and adults). The dangers of our digital lives were real so how could we hone our ability to be critical consumers of digital media. I became aware of some of my own tendencies towards screen addiction and decided to take some actions to curb what I deemed to be negative behaviors. I began adopting behavioral nudges to steer my defaults towards better behaviors.
Cambridge Analytica and The Attention Economy
By early 2018, I’d turned off all notifications on my smart phone. I deleted Facebook from my mobile phone and began to curb my web visits. I’d hop on occasionally to stay connected to friends or family, but as my usage declined, my experience of the platform began to feel different. I felt emotionally manipulated by everything I saw in my feed. Even genuine posts from people I cared about rang untrue to me. And then the news about Cambridge Analytica broke.
Even without a clear understanding of the details, I took this as a sign that it was time to deactivate my Facebook account. On a personal level, the CA scandal happened to coincide with a very busy period in my personal life. Over a period of 6 months, I got married, went on my honeymoon, found out we’re expecting, and hosted a wedding reception. I found it oddly engaging to navigate all of this without the use of Facebook. It also helped me dodge an enormous amount of advertising.
For me, it was becoming clear that my use of Facebook had become a crutch. It made things easy that were arguably a bit better if they were hard. I had to find phone numbers and addresses for people I only knew through the platform. I made phone calls and used written notes in invitations where I might’ve otherwise handled through Facebook Messenger or blast posts to my feed. My life continued fine with Facebook deactivated. Which brought me to the final step, deletion.
Clicking the Delete Button
With the news of Facebook’s most recent data breach, I’m officially deleting my account. Of course, I’m concerned about missing out on key pieces of information and losing ways to connect to friends or family. As an example of what I might miss, information about a dear friend’s memorial service was shared almost exclusively through Facebook during one of my Facebook fasts (thankfully I got the info just in time). Nonetheless, I’m willing to take the risk. It will force me to connect and stay in touch through other means. I’m viewing this as a new and positive challenge.
This morning, I downloaded my personal data and clicked the button to delete my Facebook account. They’re giving me 14 days to change my mind, but I’m convinced it’s the right move. I also feel like the data being up there with me less attentive (what was happening after deactivating but not deleting) is far too risky.
If you need to reach me, I’m still out there on plenty of social platforms — I’ve even been known to meet in person or pick up a phone. I look forward to continuing to channel my attentional energies in new ways that are less lazy, and more intentional. I‘m also open to learning more about what’s new and emerging as the influence of Facebook‘s massive, legacy, and stale platform continues to wane. If I ever decide to return (I do see this decision door as 2-way), it will be with a tabala rasa identity, and with a new sense of the risks and what’s in it for me. I‘ll see that effort as more intentionally transactional and less about my authentic identity.
I deleted Facebook today and I feel fine. I’d encourage everyone who reads this to think critically about doing the same.
