Me vs. Facebook

I’ve written no less than three separate draft posts about why I dislike Facebook which I haven’t been pleased with at all.  (Both Facebook and the draft posts.)  I have had a lot of complaints about the applications and flash bull crap they keep letting in to make the site more sticky.  I have been very displeased with their privacy policies as of late.  I have disliked how certain types of conversation and exchanges people share on their public “walls” are now de rigueur when they would have been deemed tacky just a couple years ago.  I was fleshing out all these very vitriolic tirades about how Facebook is so awful and how people use it is awful and the tragic awfulness of it all.

But more than anything I realized that the biggest issues I have had with Facebook were caused by the ways I was choosing to use it.  It just wasn’t working for me.  I would self-plagiarize and waste material I would have otherwise spun into posts here to create one-liner status updates dedicated to getting responses.  I was allowing myself to become engrossed in the ebb and flow of the updates and posts by my contacts that I was losing track of my own personal communication and life.  I realized I was the defective one in the “relationship”. (Boy, isn’t that always the case!)

I was referred to an interesting article from TIME about, of all things, reality TV by, of all people, Santino Rice on Twitter which I found very interesting:

And the personality becomes the persona. Every time you sign up for a new social-networking service, you make decisions about, literally, who you want to be. You package yourself — choose an avatar, pick a name, state your status — not unlike a storyteller creating a character or a publicist positioning a client. You can be professional on LinkedIn, flippant on Facebook and epigrammatic on Twitter. What’s more, each of these representations can be very different and yet entirely authentic. Like a reality producer in a video bay, you edit yourself to fit the context.

It’s so true and I have to confront the fact that I’m a control freak!  I didn’t like the level of control Facebook was giving me to portray the person I feel I am.  I like to have the ability to pick and choose what I tell people dynamically and not have it expressed through automated scripts or online communal behavior.  This is something we do naturally in the course of a personal conversation.  My hangup is that what happens naturally face to face, melts away in the new world of social networking with these larger “whole life” sites like Facebook.

I had been recently contemplating the decline in my usage of text messaging over the last year.  I used to send and receive in the neighborhood of 6,000 text messages a month.  That number has fallen by two thirds.  I used to very directly communicate with the people who I consider important in my life and have been getting lazy by just browsing status updates and had lost a true dialogue with them.  I need to re-kindle that level of communication with the people I care about.  It takes more effort, but it is worth it.

So is Facebook the evil and awful thing I was unsuccessfully writing about previously?  Yes and no.  They have made choices to strip away layers of privacy, which infuriates me.  However, in light of the Google Buzz debacle, Facebook really aren’t so bad in a lot of ways.  Google, please re-read your own tenets of privacy and kill Buzz.  I have realized that the real problem was the fact that I was having issues with everything.  Facebook may be the facilitator for a lot of those issues, but I was the only one who was being affected, so therefore it was my problem.  It took a small ah-ha moment for me to realize I had the ability to choose to not participate and I’m really okay with that.  Even if all the cool kids are doing it.  And their moms.