Leaving the 21st century

I made the decision recently to leave Facebook. I had been mulling it over in my head for a while and the final push came last week when my wife, during one of her sleepless bouts, had checked Facebook and saw a timestamp against my name that suggested I was actively on Facebook despite being sound asleep next to her. While I have little control over my online activity being logged somewhere, I at least want it to be accurate.

I’d been considering leaving for many reasons: the fact I found it conducive to compulsive behaviour; that it wasted my time; the knee-jerk commentry; getting friend requests from work colleagues and ex-students and accepting them because I liked them but then feeling I wasn’t so happy for them to see so much of my personal life; the data trawling and potential privacy breaches; the trolling; reaching for my mobile to ‘check-in’; the armchair politics; the adverts, particularly the adverts … I could go on.

But now I have made the decision I feel liberated. That said, there’s been some work involved in leaving the 21st century. Firstly I have been reacquainted with some long lost friends in my 5 years of using Facebook, so I wanted to notify them I was leaving and make them aware of where they could reach me in the future if they so wished. Secondly, I manage a couple of different professional and personal project Facebook Pages so I needed to set up an admin account to continue doing so—this led to the strange scenario where I had to ‘like’ myself in order to pass on admin rights to myself! And finally I wanted to delete any photos I had there that I didn’t want sitting in virtual space forever, (although I think it highly unlikely I will have truly managed this as there’s always a digital trail out there somewhere).

So from tomorrow I’ll be Facebook free when I deactivate my personal account. I only hope it doesn’t lead to me sounding smug when I say I’m not on Facebook if asked; you know, smug in the same way people sound when you ask someone if they saw a particular television programme only to be told pointedly that they don’t have a TV.