What prompted me to deactivate my account was more than a usual concern of wasting too much time on virtual connections. I came across a trove of stories of what social surfing does to your brain, your health and your wallet and decided to go on a Facebook-free diet for at least a month.
Before quitting, I was a passive user, sharing little but consuming a lot. After a while, I developed what doctors call the fear of missing out, or FOMO. Failing to check the daily feed felt like a morning without coffee. Once online, a new set of symptoms began to add to this obsessive-compulsive condition.
Somehow the grass in other people’s virtual gardens not only seemed greener, it was bushing out in all possible directions while my lawn was the same old collection of weeds. As a mature adult you must realize that there is more to people’s lives than meets the eye onscreen, but the hook is that Facebook does not want you to mature.
A recent dinner conversation with friends helped to flesh out two points of view. One is that Facebook made people more open about their lives. We share everything with our network: from the story we read in the New York Times to the quality of sleep we had last night; hence we constantly raise our voice and remind our network of who we really are.
The second point of view is that continuous exposure deteriorates our individuality and makes us needy for others’ virtual “Like.” In other words, accomplished people do not need Facebook; they have no time for it and they frankly do not care what kind of shoes their friends bought because they don’t want to copy anyone. They have their own style, their own voice, their own brain.
While I thank my network for posting that NYT article, my sympathies are with the second group and I may as well be in the minority, sometimes tagged as asocial.
Speaking about the degrees of interactivity, one of the reasons why Facebook emerged was because its founder was known to be a less-than-popular student in Harvard who wanted to stand out. He eventually found his comfort and fame behind the blue screen at the expense of other people’s social lives.
My other big issue is privacy. The network has more than half a billion users, who daily inform the universe of their likes and dislikes. While the company is still trying to establish how to properly extract and leverage all this data, you may have already noticed advertising somewhat catered to your taste. It’s a hit and miss experience, of course. I still get Russian girl ads more than anything else while surfing the web even though I am a straight woman of Slavic background.
I, however, already loathe the moment when they complete their gender analysis and start spamming me with red shoes and cooking wear. I don’t want to be predictable and I don’t need another frying pan.
But, of course, to the founders it’s not about money. In his letter to investors a month ago, Mark Zuckerberg said that the company was created “to make the world more open and connected.” I hailed this mission statement when it came to protests in Russia and revolutions in the Arab countries but on a deep personal level, I felt estranged from my clique the more I followed it. In short, we generally learn too much of what we don’t need.
Consider one extreme example from the pre-Internet times noted by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger from Oxford University in his book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.” “In the 1930s, the Dutch officials compiled an impressive national registry, which enabled the Nazis to identify 73 percent of Dutch Jews, compared with just 25 percent in less efficient France.”
What does that have to do with Facebook? I don’t know yet but the less “they” know about me and my family, the better.
I was pleased to find out that some 62 percent of Europeans don’t trust their personal data to the Internet, according to the Eurobarometer poll in 2011. Yet Facebook does tend to attract new followers and consume lives at a vicious speed, which smacks of a new cult.
After a month I came back online to fetch some contacts and reconnect with some friends whose telephone numbers or emails I did not have on hand. I scrolled down the feed and realized I have not been missing out.
Yuliya Popova is a former Kyiv Post lifestyle editor who now lives in San Francisco.
