Facebook

I’ve retreated from Facebook. Tom Hodgkinson’s article in The Guardian was the tipping point, but that just crystallised a number of thoughts I’d already been having. The fact that when I talked to friends who weren’t on Facebook they reminded me of me a couple of years ago before I finally relented and got a mobile phone – which made me think maybe I should have held out. Each one of these technologies had a mystique of inevitability, of a new world of communication. Keith reminded me also of Jerry Mander’s book In the Absence of the Sacred, and the questions he suggests we ask of new technologies.

I’d already investigated the intricacies of extracting oneself from Facebook’s embrace – the fact that you could “deactivate” but not “delete” your account; that like so many of the corporate relationships we engage in so willingly these days, our eyes closed in the first flush of love, ending the affair is not easy – getting “our stuff” back is not easy - working out who owns what when our personal details and interactions have gained impersonal value as marketing information, intellectual content… is not easy.

The corporate compromise is everywhere of course, this is written on Microsoft software and published through a Google service and I’ll probably alert some friends to its existence using my Yahoo mail account, and I stick photos up on Flickr, another Yahoo service. So who am I to moan about Facebook, come back when you’re all open source – and even then my words will depend on some Cisco server somewhere – is there no escape? Am I choosing to focus on some perceived downslide of all this, a killjoy who can’t just dissolve into the jouissance of global capitalism? Shouldn’t I just shut the fuck up, take my macbook down to Starbucks activate the wireless and put mea culpa up on Facebook and MySpace and Bebo and Friendster, so all my “friends” can see I was wrong on their RSS feeds. Can you DIGG it?

I haven’t yet “deactivated” “my” Facebook account though, I’ve not followed any of the suggested routes to full deletion. I have tried to remove every bit of personal data that was up on there and basically replaced it with Tom Hodkinson’s article. Which I guess is a provocation.

My friend Brenda, my most distanced friend – being on another continent, living in another time zone in Ohio, USA wasn’t happy about my decision or what I’d done. I guess I provoked her. This is what she had to say:

In response to the posting of Tom Hodgkinson’s article:

Uh...you can't talk to people who live 4,000 miles away in the pub? Phone is better, but long distance costs money.

In response to the posting of the Alternet article “Facebook: The New Look of Surveillance”:

If you thought posting things online was private, then you're thick. Don't post things you don't want people to see. Done.

I’m assuming that she wont mind me repeating her comments here as they are evidently not “private”.

Of course to learn this Brenda’s opinion I had to open 2 emails from Facebook telling me I had messages from Brenda on Facebook, which I then had to log into to go read. Brenda could have emailed me direct, she still can email me whenever she wants – we don’t need Facebook to stay in touch. Or we could write properly, pen on paper into envelopes marked with “air mail” stickers or “par avion” and stamps that will look funny when they arrive across the globe. And that will be “slow” communication, but it also might be “deep” communication – and it might be worth keeping. How many people make screen grabs of their friends and lovers Facebook postings so they can keep them for ever more – perhaps the digital seems eternal (which it assuredly is not) or perhaps (more likely) it just doesn’t seem so important. Am I the only person I wonder who frets, as their mobile phone meets its capacity to hold messages requiring me to delete some/all of them – the requirement for receiving new communication suddenly becoming that I go back through my inbox, reading, remembering previous communication deciding to blast an other persons words into oblivion. I want to download their messages, I want to print them out, I want to keep their exact words… yes perhaps I’m in the wrong era. But what the fuck does that mean? That the things I feel are important aren’t important anymore?