As I noted below yesterday evening, I decided to deactivate my Facebook account Monday morning, despite the great value that I tend to get from it. More than anything else, this is a personal experiment to see how my small habits will change and how I will spend my time without Facebook.
I’ve taken to most of my online socializing being through Google Hangouts or through Voxer, with some commentary given on twitter.
The biggest thing I’ve noticed today is that I am almost entirely disconnected from at least one of the social bubbles that I’ve inhabited for the past year or so. I was only made aware of such detachment when a friend alerted me via Google Hangouts of the backlash said community was posting to a current event.
I actually view this as a positive, as the overwhelming majority of news and commentary I found coming through my Facebook timeline was negative, or at least psychologically wearing. Viewing 20 different stories every day about police brutality and political corruption starts to take a toll on a person, and unsubscribing from these stories only takes one so far.
I suspect that I will post more and more often to here to voice some of my commentary. The one nice thing about Facebook was the semi-private nature of the commentary — whereas here or twitter, I have to appeal to a broader audience on the whole.