How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate Facebook

I find there’s a lot of value in being contrarian.  Presenting alternatives to prevailing viewpoints in science, in politics, and in friendly conversation breaks dogmatic thinking, turning minds away from following one point of view or another “just because”.  Doing so forces perspective into discussion, and pushes people to examine their own reasons for believing whatever it is they believe, infuriating as the process can often be.  It’s important, and even when I find myself taking the brunt of a siege of arguments seemingly motivated by little other than someone’s urge to play devil’s advocate, I’m aware that this sort of thing keeps me sharp and accountable to my own ideas.

I’m also a firm believer that an “argument” is something entirely separate from and unlike a “fight”, but that’s another story altogether.

What’s troubling me lately is how often I’ve caught myself taking up a contrarian stance in terms of what sort of things – across the whole giddy spread of my life – I support and put my energy into.  I’ve contracted indie kid syndrome, a reflex to root for the underdogs in life, so to speak, and pick apart the more ubiquitous phenomena I experience.  Hell, first person to identify the source of this post’s title wins a prize.

Let’s not talk about my music taste here, that’s a tangled quagmire of its own.  Let it be known that I keep myself very well in check unless I’m specifically asked to share music with friends (my greatest joy) or someone within earshot lazily proclaims that “there’s just no good music anymore” (I will cram a mixtape worth of evidence to the contrary down your throat so fast your esophagus will wind up throttling your netherbits).

I’m trying to segue into why I now hate Facebook, and it’s honestly not because it’s so popular.

Now officially the world’s most popular social network, there’s not a single human being under the age of thirty I’m acquainted with who doesn’t have a Facebook account.  This thing is more or less Hobbe’s Leviathan, up to and including the fact that once you’re in, you can never get out (the political philosopher in me just rofl’d).  I, like most college-faring folks I know, uploaded my life to this thing in the first week of University, largely to keep in touch with the onslaught of new girls people I was meeting but probably, deep down, because everyone else was doing it and you just, like, had to get facebook!

Ever been confronted by some obscure creature who told you they don’t have msn, or facebook, or anything?  Can you recall the twisting and churning in your gut as your mind feebly attempted to wrap itself ’round the notion that someone could appear to exist, and yet not exist at all?  Why do we get like that, hmm?

In any case, I stripped my profile of all notifications/news feed privileges late last year, and haven’t updated it in about as long.  I haven’t made the jump to “deleting” my account because the network is about the slickest and most comprehensive stalking mechanism address book one could ask for.  Sure, I’ll probably never need to get in touch with that girl I met at that party one time and had all of two im’s with in total, ever, but god knows I could if I wanted to.  The decision to abandon ship wasn’t some act of underdog rage, but I didn’t think till now why I really can’t stand the platform anymore.

Here’s why:

• The goddamn facebook applications.  This is well known and largely laughed off, but come on.  I wasn’t even a popular guy by social networking standards and I had legions of invitations, superpokes, zombies coming after me, pies in the face, and other surreal bullshit with no connection to real life or my relationships with the people I was getting them from.
• The high volume of friend adds made the whole exercise meaningless.  I’m well aware that the majority of my friends on facebook don’t talk to me or have any intentions about seeing me again, ever.  That doesn’t stop people from adding me, because the exercise is much more like making additions to an aggrandized filing system than seeking to forge closer communication.
• The fucking drama.
• The “you should totally put that on facebook!” epidemic.  This once got to the point where the only reason myself, my friends, or anyone I knew would bust out a camera was to take samey, usually drunk pictures of everyone they knew.  Which is fine, in and of itself.  But when 90% of all pictures you see are badly taken images of a couple of friends doing the “zomg smiles!” pose with beverage in hand, the process is numbing instead of personal or even noteworthy.
• The spam crowds out genuine interaction.  Trying to put together an event on facebook, which used to be one of its best features, is presently a joke, and why shouldn’t it be?  People are so bombarded by minuscule updates, obvious Send All invitations, and other miscellaneous noise that even when your event totally has like 50 people rsvp’d to it, at least half of those hit accept without thinking about it and most of the rest never intended to go to your weekend camping drinky trip thing anyway.
• The insane lack of privacy.  This goes two ways: one, you and I and everyone else on the network is exposed to pretty well anyone with curiosity, facebook’s mediocre privacy protection notwithstanding; two, being constantly fed tedium by way of the overly gregarious mini-feed is nauseating and disturbing.  One can’t not stalk everyone they’ve ever friended, and it feels unhealthy.
• The whole repetitive mass of it.  This is the gestalt problem.  Every facebook page is the same.  The medium encourages it.  The only alternative to the stock format is to plaster ones profile with hordes of the gaudiest applicationware available, drowning even the most interesting information in a tide of all caps and thinly veiled spammer schemes.  Hey, even myspace lets you design your own page.

In essence, Facebook is about stalking.  It went up with the ambition of being the ultimate networking solution, and maybe it did that.  But this was never about having conversations, or bringing people together in a meaningful way.  It is and always has been a sanitized myspace, something that offers everything and nowadays accomplishes nothing.  I still maintain mine in a passive state as a detailed contact list, but nothing more.  I’m done facebooking.

I like newer social networking services a priori because they represent a networking reboot button for myself.  Services like Plurk, Twitter, and so on focus intently on one or two features available on facebook, and in doing so return social networking to something properly social, not something that’s all about assembling an overwhelming but personality-free profile and occasionally feeding it pictures.  Sure, it’s easy to argue how Tweets are just as noisy, but the fact is these networks consist of people’s thoughts and expressions, not bland preconfigured altars.  That’s what I want my networking to be about.