“Email and PDA, cell phone and voice mail were extensions of the ruinous consuming self. They made thoughts of the self instantaneously and irrepressibly accessible. Who’s calling me, who’s texting me, who wants me, me, me. The ego went along on every walk and ride, replacing the vistas and skylines, scrambling the delicate meditative code.”
— Joshua Ferris, The Unnamed
In June, I turned over my Facebook password to my oldest friend, whom I trust not to send prank messages to my other friends, and deleted the app from my phone. It feels like years.
I missed Facebook like a phantom limb until K.C. allowed me to look through her Newsfeed when she stayed over in July for her certification exam. All the clutter and clamor repelled me instantly. My neck tensed in the familiar way and I turned into a hound, snout to the ground, sharp-eyed, led compulsively by the nose on the hunt for scraps of news. I was amazed that I could have missed this pathetic state and that incessant noise, the visual equivalent of a plague of late August cicadas.
True, there are other ways to operate Facebook. I could use it as a stage where I just talk at people. (Ironically, without Facebook, I don’t know how to publicize my blog posts, so I’m unsure who’s going to see this one.) I would upload pictures or share links when the whim struck me. I wouldn’t be obligated at all to engage with anyone else. Oh my dear friends, my time is just too important, my priorities too consuming, for me to go out of my way to pay attention to anything unrelated to me. Don’t you see that I must have every conversation on MY terms? That’ll help me win friends and influence people for sure, right.
I didn’t think so either. If self-exhibition were my purpose, I wouldn’t maintain a Facebook account at all. For me, the purpose of Facebook is still to keep in touch with friends scattered around the world and share a bit, no matter how little, in their lives.
But so much crap goes on Facebook and I’m tired of being the receptacle for every trivial thought and announcement. Entire days, seasons, lives are lived on it, complete with hiccups and bowel movements. If only all the news were ranked intelligently instead of tipped over in truckloads, if Facebook were more sentient and filtered out what I would be glad to ignore, if the people on there themselves would conscientiously tag “Category 3” or “Code Red”. I certainly started feeling steadier on my feet when I stopped flicking my thoughts at my social circles at all hours of the day and contained them in my head or journal instead.
If I go back to Facebook, I could maybe decide to go through my Newsfeed a few times a month. But I am a very thorough person, and would be burdened by the thought of inadvertently skipping important details. And if I’m on Facebook for the sake of keeping up with my friends’ lives, then what kind of a friend would I be if I miss milestone announcements, such as someone’s engagement or new baby? If I miss that, what am I doing commenting on a picture of their burned breakfast omelette two weeks later?
There’s no way I’m going back to using Facebook as something of a 24/7 all-round provider of recreation and entertainment. The problem with Facebook is that it brings the weight of social expectations, networks, and interactions down on your consciousness all day long. Sometimes you need to withdraw and get a change in perspective. Unless you have iron self-control, you look at Facebook and wonder about what other people are doing and talking about and what you could also be doing and talking about instead of doing what you should be doing right that moment. Then when you see your friends in person, your reunions are less refreshing because you have been constantly in superficial contact with them. Worse, you will feel less balanced when you’re by yourself due to Facebook’s ever-present reminders of all the people you could be socializing with, or all the people who are socializing with one another instead of with you, or all the people who are accomplishing things at their pace when the only thing you should be concerned with is your own accumulation of effort. The fact is that momentous developments are rare in anyone’s life, but Facebook happens to supply it in concentrate. The very idea of all the social noise produces an echo of gnawing disquiet and makes me shudder.
I’m turning my back on that feeling of paralysis, swimming against the tide to take in an impossible deluge of information like one of those summer thunderstorms that turn the length from earth to sky into white mist. Not quite a social engagement yet not quite a retreat, it is an encounter without the warmth of connection and an isolation without peace or renewal. I refuse to sit with my eyes glued to the screen, locked — to borrow the words of a much better writer than I, Bohumil Hrabal, and his translator from the Czech– in “too loud a solitude”.
Adventures with Captain Wentworth 