14 Apr How A Month Without Facebook Has Changed My Life
Posted at 08:00h
in Facebook
Back on March 14th, my birthday, I deactivated my Facebook account. I’d found that over the preceding couple of months I’d been spending an increasing amount of time on the site, either via PC or my smartphone. I posted a lot of links, wrote a lot of status updates and commented a lot on other people’s status’. I was certainly what you’d class as a ‘heavy user’ and had become somewhat sucked in to Facebook to the detriment of the real world. And so I quit.
This week, for the first time in a month, I logged back on. Or, to be more precise, I tentatively and somewhat reluctantly returned to the site. I did so purely for professional reasons – I need a Facebook profile in order to administer a number of fan pages for clients – and didn’t post a status update or take any actions. And yet inside of 24 hours I had people posting on my wall, welcoming me back and asking how I’ve been. And it’s forced me to address something: now that my self-enforced 30 day hiatus is complete, has my opinion of Facebook changed?
All in all, I’d have to say very much so. Prior to 14th March I was a little addicted to Facebook. I simply couldn’t understand the opinion of some people that it isn’t the real world, that it fosters pseudo-relationships and that we should live offline not online. To me, it enhanced my life – it enabled me to keep in touch with people, to share my thoughts, likes and dislikes, and to have a bit of fun. I had already carried out a ‘cull’ a few weeks earlier of people who I didn’t know offline or with whom I had no contact online, and this had resulted in a group of only 60 or so ‘friends’ with whom I was in Facebook contact with.
So what’s happened to make me change my mind? Largely, I have to say, I didn’t miss Facebook. After the initial cold turkey twitchiness wore off, I can honestly say that I haven’t given Facebook a second thought over the last few weeks. And when I logged back on this week and scanned down my homepage, it dawned on me that Facebook updates really are, for the most part, vacuous. And that isn’t intended to be offensive to any of my friends – I’d very much include my own updates in that vacuous vein too. I really don’t care that MrX is ‘feeling fed up’ (no reason given) or that MissY ‘wants to have a barbeque’. Have one then…
I find myself levelling the same criticisms of inane drivel at Facebook as many people who don’t understand it for the valuable knowledge sharing resource it is aim at Twitter. During the last month I have, without doubt, lost contact with a number of people whom I was regularly interacting with, and that’s a real shame. But it was very much surface level interaction – there was no depth to our friendships. And what I have gained in return I would take every time – more time with my daughter, more time talking about my thoughts with my wife rather than sinking them into the endless depths of Facebook updates, a better home life as a result, a better connection with the real world, a better appreciation of life in general. In summary, as my wife says, I’ve been more ‘present’.
So will I return to Facebook on a personal level? Undoubtedly, yes, and I’m not kidding myself that I won’t when I need a profile for other reasons. BUT…it will be on a significantly lesser basis. I don’t intend on logging on outside of office hours and I’ve removed status and message notifications from my mobile. My month without Facebook HAS changed my life. For the better. And I’d encourage everyone to give it a go. Just for a few weeks. Could you handle it?
tweetmeme_source = ‘ThePaulSutton’; tweetmeme_url = ‘http://tribalboogie.blogspot.com/2010/04/experiment-did-i-survive-month-without.html’;
Like This Post? Subscribe to Tribal Boogie
