It has been a little under a year since I wrote my piece about Facebook and then left Facebook. Now, with the beginning of a new, and final, school year, I will likely be creating a new Facebook account. Going for this last year without Facebook has allowed me a good time to truly evaluate the points that I made when I started this “experiment” and to determine what exact values can be extracted from the social network that don’t appear available elsewhere. In this post, I hope to evaluate the arguments that I made in the previous post about Facebook and develop justifications for starting a new Facebook profile.
To start with, I would like to wholly dismiss my argument regarding the opportunity cost of time spent on Facebook. This argument was the only argument I made about something completely personal, as opposed to the other arguments being about social consequences. The simple idea behind this argument was that I could be doing better things with my time. The truth of the matter is, however, that I did not spend more time doing things that I deemed more “productive” than I would have done with Facebook. If instead of looking at Facebook as a social tool, I look at it simply as an entertainment, or content delivery, system then it is really no better or worse than a lot of the other entertainment options out there on the internet today. The conclusion to this idea seems to be that when it’s time to relax and do something mindless, I relax and do something mindless. The absence of Facebook just moved me into other mindless activities, rather than into more “productive” hobbies.
This leads into my new perspective of how Facebook is actually useful. Rather than being a tool for helping one develop social relationships and fulfill their social needs, its primary usefulness comes from being an entertainment platform and a personal marketing tool. Facebook is entertaining, and the characters and stories with which you can amuse yourself are people you actually know. It also does have some organizational ability for groups that cannot really be done by other (arguably better) technologies since they do not have the massive network size to back them up. Furthermore, I miss the use of Facebook’s ability to deliver content to me from organizations and “non-friends.” When I used Facebook, one of things that I used it most for was to get daily articles and blogs from The Economist. I haven’t really found a decent substitute for that.
From the marketing perspective, I find that I do need some kind of effective way to market myself. I had the idea that I would spend more time blogging here after I left Facebook, which as stated above was not the case. In the particular of writing new blog posts, I find that without the incentive of knowing that there will be an audience for something that I write, I end up being less inclined to write. Since I’m also considering some other creative projects, such as potentially developing a weekly podcast, I need a platform to get the word out. The bottom line is that when I had Facebook, I got click throughs to this blog. When I stopped using Facebook, those click throughs stopped. That in turn made me want to write less, which in turn meant the little audience I might have had evaporated. If I changed the title of Facebook members from “friends” to “audience members” or “followers” or “listeners,” then the impersonal nature of the Facebook environment seems much less troubling.
In my original post, the arguments about the impersonal and socially destructive nature of Facebook still hold a great deal of water, and was probably the main thrust of my leaving Facebook at the time. This is where I still believe that my original argument got a lot of things right. Facebook is still being used as a substitute for real human interaction. I see the effect of the network in my daily life here on campus, as people are engrossed in their phones. Furthermore, my idea that leaving Facebook would allow me to develop richer and more meaningful relationships with people also held water. However, the new richness of my relationships could partially be a side effect of recommitting to developing friendships at the same time as leaving Facebook and so the causality is suspect. These observations though justify why the use of Facebook as a kind of enjoyable diversion, as opposed to an actual social necessity, is critical. These two opposing uses, the entertainment purpose which I would consider reasonable, and the social fulfillment purpose which I would consider destructive, have yet to have been looked at in much seriousness as separable. Most of the people I encounter find Facebook absolutely necessary, and have commented to me that they would not have a social life in absence of Facebook, which from my new experience I believe to be wholly false.
I find that summarizes that conclusion of my little experiment. First, a social life will emerge regardless of Facebook usage, and one can find more clarity in relationships by not using it. The anxiety that people feel about not having that connection to Facebook is unwarranted, and in many ways I would encourage taking an extended absence from the service if one has found themselves trapped in Facebook as a social existence. Not being a part of Facebook will get rid of the “false” or virtual social life, and allow for an understanding of where someone actually fits in the social picture. It is enlightening, rather than isolating once one gets over the fear of being alone. Second, the size of the network and its use in disseminating information cannot be denied. While I would love for everyone to live in a Project Diaspora dream world and use better and better technologies that expand how we think about obtaining and spreading information, the network effects of Facebook will ensure that other technologies will remain marginal at best until a deal breaker technology emerges. It could be some time before something unique enough comes along to change the Facebook paradigm.
Finally, I am still a believer in the ill effects on socialization that Facebook and the always connected world causes. I recently watched a commercial for the iPad in which a family was sitting around a campfire, and the person had to stop and take out their iPad to tweet “Out camping with family!” In yet another dream world of mine, people should be openly revolting against this vision of the world. It is a world in which nothing is real and in which there is no experience of the place in which one is currently existing. The entire experience, even the one right in front of you, becomes a part of the virtual, make-believe world. However, I can’t help the revolution from outside the world. The world needs to begin a conversation about what they really want from their connected electronic devices, and what they don’t want. Figuring this out will mean starting to require people to experience some amount of depth of thought. Ironically, however, the only place large and connected enough to begin such a wide discussion would be inside the network itself. If I want to have that discussion, it has to be from the inside.
So what do you all say, will you be my audience members?
And if all of these arguments fail to convince, the truth of returning to Facebook is simply that I need a place to post more ponies.
