bevedog

Most readers of this newsletter were also my Facebook friends, so you know that I made a small fuss about leaving that site last month.

In many ways it’s a shame. I started on Facebook in fall of 2006, when you still needed a .edu email address to join. At the time I had a library blog and was very excited about all kinds of social networking sites and their potential for librarians, libraries, and people in general.

At the start, I would send out friend requests to anyone and everyone and accept them in return. That’s the whole idea of the network effect, and the strength of weak ties: build a large network and get exposed to a lot of new ideas and possibilities.

I got a taste of how this could backfire in 2015 when I posted a somewhat snarky message about faculty at the college where I work, and someone passed it along to a professor who thought it was all about him (it kinda was, kinda wasn’t). After that, I cut back my friends list drastically, and limited my Facebook friends from work to people who had looked after my kids—I figured that was a good definition of “real” friends.

As 2015 flowed into 2016 I cut back on Facebook friends a little bit more. I didn’t have many pro-Trump friends, but I did have some “both-sides” types who stressed me out and I figured I didn’t owe them anything. I lost another friend from high school when I compared Trump’s election to 9/11 and she took offense (I was fucking right). As I started to post more radical political material and became more paranoid I cut back more friends with “who won’t report me to the secret police” being the dividing line.

And in the end, I think I actually had Facebook whipped into shape, where all my Facebook friends were actual friends, and I missed out almost entirely on the disinformation, the agitprop, the rage shares and so on. I commented that whenever some Trump thing popped up on my feed it was because my dad was in the comments calling Trump a piece of shit. So that was nice.

But still I quit because of what I think Facebook is doing to us all. The Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma does a good job of laying out a lot of the more manipulative techniques that all the social sites use. I read Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine which has many thought-provoking things to say about the social industry, including, near the end,

…this horror story is possible only in a society that is busily producing horrors. We are only up for addiction to mood-altering devices because our emotions seem to need managing, if not bludgeoning by relentless stimulus…. Twitter toxicity is only endurable because it seems less worse than the alternatives. (p. 212)

Two things about that: first, I feel that in my case, moving on from Facebook is a sign of good mental health. In years past I would sometimes delete social accounts in a snit because it felt like a safe little faux suicide, killing off part of myself. That’s not what this one is about, and I rarely feel like that these days (fingers crossed).

Also, I’m still on the damn Twitter. And Reddit, sorta. Part of the problem is just a fear of missing out, or just a fear of lacking that stimulus. Decades ago, I came across new ideas in books and magazines and zines and so on. These days, I still read books and sometimes zines, but usually ones I first heard about online. Magazines are basically nonexistent in my life. They were replaced by blogs and when blogs kind of went away, with social media sites.

Then there are the “Facebook Papers” which show what we’ve suspected all along—that Facebook understood very well how it was causing harm to users, but management routinely ignored complaints and warnings from staff because to fix those problems would result in decreased use of the site. All they care about is time on site and engagement, even when they know that what people are actually doing is harmful to them.

So yeah, that’s why I finally pulled the plug. I don’t miss Facebook at this point, but I know I will miss the people that I mostly interacted with in that space. It was kind of magical when I would post something there and get comments from people I knew in all different phases of my life. I’m glad a bunch of you subscribe here, and I’m still interested in hearing about what’s going on in your lives, too.