Caught in Facebook’s web
The recent brouhaha around Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his social media empire’s apparently inability to protect the privacy of its users made me consider taking a break from my favourite chat and share platform.
Actually, this is an annual pilgrimage for me: the sober shutting down of online networks in my life for a short period of time, during which I re-charge, walk barefoot and smirk at my strength in the face of 21st-century technology.
Five years ago, I went as far as threatening to delete my Facebook account. This wasn’t the done thing back then, not like it is today, when users publicly announce that they’re going, or are done with this but end up hanging around anyway, lured back by comments on their farewell post, begging them to stay.
These days, I’m so stickily connected to a virtual reality by Facebook, that deleting the account isn’t a remote possibility. For work purposes, it’s genius; for family reunions, it’s priceless.
However, chat ’n share spots like Facebook are still like affairs with married men – just wrong on a million levels. But, like temptation, what’s wrong seems right when you’re in the thick of it.
The angels in my life who’ve escaped being snared by the tangled social web of what blogger Bryony Gordon labels, “banality, boasting and boring banter” are, without doubt, mostly better off than I am.
Facebook and similar sites have not only made their founders outrageously rich; they’ve brought out the very worst in the very best of people.
Naturally, this doesn’t apply to every social media user on the virtual planet – but I’ve seen some good men and women fall from grace because we’ve made relationships too reliant on the touch of a button.
Gordon complains that every time she logs onto Facebook, “I feel as if a little bit of me dies inside. Specifically, the bit of me responsible for faith in the world and the human beings that inhabit it.”
The thing is, Facebook has made her “actively dislike” people. And worse – she enjoys it.
Passive aggressives who can’t bring themselves to “unfriend” people simply moan about them in private messages – and enjoy a bit of a look-see on their profiles to add fuel to the gossip fire.
The issue, I think, is time. Wasted and irrationally spent when one could be doing something useful, like cleaning cat bowls or de-cluttering.
And that’s where Facebook separates the men from the boys, so to speak: those of us with the slightest tendencies to procrastinate, gossip or moan are going to become Faceaholics. The new-age, virtual equivalent of physical addiction.
That makes it tough to give up, which is why most people take a hiatus, be it for a week, or a month. I tried it once, too.
It was a tough love approach for a social media addict and, eish, it was difficult. No, really! After sending an e-mail and making the bed, my fingers automatically reached for the bottle – or button, as it were – much like a functioning alcoholic who needs her daily fix.
But it’s like anything in life. If you don’t practise moderation, you’re going to binge. And my reunion was heady and overdone – after my hiatus, I went on a Facebook bender that lasted six hours and grew me three new wrinkles come morning.
In the process, as you would blind-drunk and inhibition-free in a public place, I angered two religious fundamentalists, spewed criticism at four governments, got into a debate about organic food with a hyper-conservative from Alabama and was summarily unfriended by a sweet lass from a sleepy UK village, who explained that she’d rather talk tea and sheep, thank-you very much, than be slam-dunked by my verbal overkill on her laptop.
I think savvy psychiatrists probably invented Facebook. There never was an easier way to sort the mellows from the crazies.
And at least, if you’re sane, you’ve got a free database showing you who best to avoid in a fist fight.
