Why I left Facebook

or

 I didn't want to know you *that* well

thoughts from a much loved friend who prefers to remain anonymous. Thank you for letting me post this Señor Anónimo!

I left Facebook perhaps a year ago, perhaps more. This was after going away and then coming back with a "secret identity" so Señor Sugarmountain couldn't sell my personal info to corporations. In that guise, unable to "connect and share" as intended, there didn't seem to be much point being there. But even after leaving the second time, I missed seeing pictures that my wife told me some friends had posted. I also had trouble corresponding with some friends whose email boxes were always full. So I began to sneak on using my wife's account (and leaving her love notes in the New Device dialog box when logging in). Yes, the thing is addictive, and this stealthy login became more frequent. But now I've decided to leave for good, and let the chips fall. Why? I've finally pinpointed what's wrong with "social" networks.

One of the supposed attractions of these networks is to regain contact with old friends and classmates. That can be fun, or not. You see, people sometimes change, and some of them change into something distasteful. I did get in touch with many old friends and classmates, and a few of them were even more fun than I remembered. Likewise, friends of the fun ones were also fun, and I made what my wife calls "e-friends". But then there were those who had turned incredibly nasty, bigoted and strident. Actually even some of the fun folks were strident at times. That seems to come naturally on Facebook, where Declaring Yourself On The Issues is as easy as clicking "Share", and political organizers have decided that Americans don't hate each other enough, so they have posted a lot of extreme stuff, at which people can either nod yes or recoil in horror.

I doubt if, in real life, most of my nasty, bigoted former classmates (or, to my shame, relatives) would have opened a conversation with how much they hated politician X or people of group Y or religion Z. It might never have come up. In fact, I've worked out an unspoken truce with certain relatives that boils down to the old formula I learned from my mother: don't talk politics or religion in polite company. Conservatives (the old-fashioned kind who were worthy of the name, like my mother) used to understand this when I was a kid. Back then, it was only wild-eyed radicals like my "crazy aunt" who would preach over family dinner about the injuries done to Native Americans and the essential virtues of wheat grass juice when everyone else wanted to talk about how various relatives were coping with their illnesses and how the fruit trees were doing that year. It's not that her views were so bad (except maybe the stuff about UFOs), it's that I would have preferred to hear about them when I asked, not all the time.

I know it's election season, and I know how easy it is to feel one must respond to fire with fire. I, too, found it easy to do that when I was on Facebook. That's why I blame the medium, not necessarily the individuals involved, for my bad experiences. Facebook is no longer social, you see. More and more, it's just a multiple-choice menu of positions to endorse, with no thinking or consideration for others required. When I think of social, I think of real human stuff: pictures of your friends, your kids, your garden, your pets, your Harley, your drinking buddies if need be, but something real. That's still there on Facebook, but it's getting buried in sloganeering.

I understand everyone seems to want unconditional love these days, but I find it hard to connect that deeply solely by typing. Considering that typing and clicking is most of what we have on a website, I have to wonder if we'd all like each other better if we considered how well our long-distance friends really want to know us, and settled for conditional "Like". Unfortunately, I've ended up liking some relatives and old friends a lot less based on what they've posted in public. For the sake of being able to get together in peace, I'd rather not know more about them. If we do get together, I hope they'll just talk about the weather.