Auf Weidersehn Fakebook
July 2nd 2010 00:57
Who is this friend you ask? Well, it’s Facebook. That’s right, I said goodbye to the social networking utility used by 5.7% of the world’s population.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Facebook is an internet site created in 2004 by a then 19-year-old college student as a social networking tool. It spread to other campuses, then on to high school’s and from there as they say, into the history books.
When I first signed on as a Facebook user, everyone told me to watch out for its addictive qualities. “Pshah!” I thought. I’ve got a life, I’ve got kids. It’s a website for goodness sakes! Well, 403 friends and two years later, I was cruising the site up to twenty times a day like a cop at a doughnut bar.
And the funny thing was I couldn’t tell you who half of those 403 people in my friend list were. And the people I actually spoke to (and by “spoke to” I mean texted online) were probably only in the double digits.
So, although it was nice to reconnect with that girl in my 3rd grade art class, I had to make some changes. And since “friend list fluffing”, as I call it, runs rampant on Facebook – a term meaning accepting or seeking out friendships from acquaintances of acquaintances just to up your friend numbers – I decided to take a stand and I “un-friended” 213 people.
I took the virtual scissors to my friend’s list and whittled it down to 190 people who I at least knew I had had a real conversation with and could put a face to a name. But that still wasn’t good enough. The monkey was still on my back, pushing me, pulling me to just go and see what everyone was up to. Leave a clever quote; make a cute comment on the picture of a friend’s kid with mashed carrots on their face. Forget that you have a telephone in your house; who needs to actually speak to human beings anyway?
So as other greats in history have done before me (wink wink), I took my last stand...I un-friended Facebook. I left my contact information and signed off. I hope Facebook can get along without me with only 399,999,999 friends left. Now, if that phone would just ring...
You can read my day-to-day diary of this by clicking on my Un-friending Facebook link at the top of this post or below.
Really Long Link
image credit: Lisa Donovan
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I said goodbye to Facebook about a week ago. It did feel like an addiction. I kicked it in stages. First I sold the acres over in Farmville. Then I sailed away from Island Paradise. Then I streamlined my friend list. Then after reading several things that really aggravated me I deactivated my account
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