Facebook = ADDICTION

This is probably obvious to most of you, but the Facebook “friends” that I interacted with the most were the ones who tended to be the most addicted. They posted more status updates and comments because they spent a lot of time on the social networking site.  That is what I would always do, too. So I ended up giving the most attention to those who are the greatest addicts. I realized that I ended up spending the most time interacting with the people who were the worst influences — highly unproductive people who don’t value their time. This had many effects, such as causing me to become more addicted to the site and to feel the urge to post more often just for the sake of posting. The closer I became with those people, the more I got sucked into spending more time on the site. After I deactivated my Facebook, I asked myself, Should I really be giving so much attention to a social networking site? When I dropped Facebook, I also dropped off the radar of some of, what I always called, my biggest fans on Facebook. I am no longer subject to their influence, which was probably stronger than I would care to admit. Breaking free of this cycle was a wise choice. I should have done it sooner.

A Friend Isn't Necessarily a "Friend"

I can be friendly with people from all walks of life, but when it comes to which people are most compatible as my long-term friends, some of my friends on Facebook are not a good fit for the kinds of lasting friendships that I wish to obtain. The main issue is the age difference. Some of my Facebook friends are like twice my age because they are my mom's friends. They simply don’t have the life experience that I do to give the kind of value I gain from a good friendship.  I like having friends my age, or at least near my age. They help me stay young at heart, and they help me keep my thinking from becoming stale. When I dropped Facebook, my social life began to rebalance itself automatically. For a few years now, this has been a challenging part of my life to balance. It took a while to recognize and accept that my online “friends” and my best in-person friends are very different people. Most of my Facebook “friends” wouldn’t have been very compatible as in-person friends. We wouldn’t have had enough in common to develop a particularly deep friendship. So it seems odd to refer to them as friends in the same way I’d refer to my in-person friends. I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t just fill up my social bucket with an endless supply of friends and expect good results, even if they’re very intelligent and all those positive characteristics. So that’s a specific reason Facebook really had to go — using Facebook was a lame attempt on my part to expect that my in-person friends and Facebook friends would/could be the same people.

It's All About Computer Interaction

So I'm sitting here going through withdrawals from my Facebook.  But then I begin to realize the reality of using Facebook is that I am just typing and viewing insignificant bits of information on a digital device (computer, cell phone, etc). The next time you use such a service, pause for a moment and do a reality check. You should ask yourself these questions. What are you actually doing? Who is with you? How is this advancing your life? What if you do this for twenty more years? What do you expect to gain from it? You can call it social networking, but it is not really a social experience if you are actually alone sitting at a computer. I consider real socialization to be face to face. I feel that there is a tremendous richness to in-person socialization that just does not translate over the Internet, at least not yet. A ***hug*** isn’t a real hug. A smiley isn’t a real smile. All you are doing is pushing buttons. I will go so far as to say that Facebook is not social networking, but anti-social retreating. If you want to disagree with me about this, you will have say it to my face. If you try to tell me off by typing something on a digital device, you are only proving me right. Evil, I know. :)  I apologize for this post being more of a rant, but I just could not help myself from this.  I am irritated with having no Facebook right now.  I hope everyone else's immersions are going great!

Facebook is False... Say What?

I am a very extroverted person, for those of you who do not know or cannot tell.  As a child, I was somewhat introverted, though.  In kindergarten, I was the girl who played in the sandbox all by herself. I do not think I was lonely just because I did that. I just found sand toys more interesting than people back then. As I got older, I gradually became more of an extrovert. I believe that this was partly by choice. I pushed myself to develop my social skills and to embrace what I once avoided. It is said that "you’re an introvert if you recharge your batteries while being alone, and you’re an extrovert if you recharge in the company of others." That metaphor does not seem to work for me, though. I prefer balance, usually by taking turns. If I spend a lot of time alone, I feel a strong desire to go out and be social. But after a very social week with it being spring break, which was an absolute blast, I feel the desire to retreat back to my dorm room and enjoy more solitary time. Being active on Facebook had the effect of filling my social bucket. Essentially it is a false fill to me, like drinking salt water instead of fresh water. Instead of providing a real sense of connection that satisfies, it made me think I was out there being social, but I really was not. Facebook activity could never recharge my batteries in the way that face to face interaction does. When I dropped Facebook, I began feeling genuinely more social when I would go out and do things with my friends. When I WAS active on Facebook, I would not do that as much because I had the false sense that I was being social by interacting with my online friends.

Is Each Person Really a Unique Individual?

Facebook compacts so much communication into a single stream, and this can have a depersonalizing effect. When I would post something on a friend’s wall, I wasn’t just communicating with that friend. I was communicating with their posse, too. If I used the private messaging feature, it was just one message among dozens. Friends were becoming interchangeable. One thing that surprised me was just how few of my Facebook friends I actually missed when I deactivated my account. It was difficult to think of my old Facebook friends as individuals. They were all just part of the collective whole. When I moved away from the collective, it wasn’t like I had lost any individual friends. Dropping Facebook wasn’t at all like disconnecting from hundreds of individual friends. I didn’t miss anyone in particular because my Facebook experience was like connecting with a collective. I noticed the absence of the collective when I left, but I didn’t miss it per se. The exception is that if I knew specific Facebook friends from real life, meaning that we’d met in person and had at least one good conversation together, then I could still see them as individuals. But I don’t need Facebook to stay in touch with those people anyway, so I didn’t feel like I was losing any of these connections by dropping Facebook. I realize this might sound rather strange, but it’s the best I can explain it. My Facebook page was very busy with wall posts and such activities of those sort. The feeling that I was interacting with a collective began to feel rather creepy, as you might imagine. I’m glad to be off of Facebook, since I really don’t wish to be assimilated. It’s nice not to feel like there’s an endless stream of other people’s thoughts flowing through my mind all the time. I can hear my own thoughts once again, and they’re a lot more relaxed.

Third Time's a Charm.. Not So Much!

Well today is the third day with no Facebook.  I still feel the urge to share certain things with my online “friends”. I have felt, a lot at times, I should post this. I take some funny/cute pictures with friends and all that and think, I want to share this. In the past, when I had Facebook, I would have shared those things out of habit. Then, I would normally check back in later and read through a few dozen comments that people left.  Doing that normally, which I can't now, there would be a little bit more emotional reward in having that sense of connection. Without the option to impulse-share, like I would love to,  during this thirty-day immersion, I allow those feelings to come and go without acting on them. I have recently noticed that there is a consequence to sharing in real-time. I wasn’t being very present in the moment. While things are happening around me, today especially, I am off thinking about my online posse, and what I might wish to share with them. When I stop acting on the desire to impulse-share, I become more present to what I was doing in the moment. Instead of being distracted by thoughts of connecting with people at a distance, I do a lot better job of connecting with the people right in front of me. I feel more immersed in my experiences. It was definitely a subtle change at first, but it feels good now that I'm three days in to it. During these past two and a half days, I often feel obligated to share frequent updates with my online “friends”, some of whom I’d never met in person. If I didn’t post an update for a while, some would complain. If I shared something cool, people would thank me for it. Now that I’ve been rolling back and not posting, I can see what a dead end it’s been. I allowed social media to lead me to behave a certain way, but it’s not a conscious choice I would have made otherwise. So it’s nice to regain conscious control over this part of my life. Even after 30 days, the desire to impulse-share I fell will still be there, but it will grow fainter, replaced by a growing desire to “be here now,” fully present in what’s going on in front of me. I still like sharing, but it’s better to do so thoughtfully instead of impulsively, over social networking.

On day 2 there's no blues..

Even though it has only been a day since I dropped Facebook, I noticed that the communication volume in my life has dropped significantly.  Even though I say that the communication volume in my life has significantly dropped, I have felt no drop in the level of significant and meaningful communication. What I have seemed to lose is mostly a lot of noise. Generally speaking, communicating via Facebook is a shallow experience. When I had Facebook I would read streams of brief messages from a variety of people, but the messages didn’t contain much depth. Most are trivial and sometimes pointless even. Some are even clever or witty. Very little of the information that I used to digest on Facebook is memorable and life changing. I mean, using Facebook can still give people a feeling of connectedness, but the long-term benefits are negligible. Facebook essentially gave me the emotional sense that I was doing something worthwhile (connecting with people), but when I step back and look at my actions and results from a more objective perspective, it becomes clear that I was really just spinning my wheels. So basically what I am saying now, since I have dropped Facebook, I let go of a lot of trivial communication, but I don’t feel that anything truly valuable has been lost.