Losing My Facebook: Day 1

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I use Facebook. A lot. I get a lot of use out of it for a few purposes. I manage a few pages, including some professional pages, use groups to keep people in my professional network updated, and get a lot of use out of it as both a social platform and a publishing platform. One of the main reasons I don’t update this blog as much as I wish I did is because I get much of my commentary in on facebook. I am on the road often, and usually work from home when I’m not, so I use the chat function to stay in touch with friends and to maintain a social network.

quitting-facebook

I also want to quit Facebook.

There are plenty of articles out there about how you should quit Facebook and go out and smell the flowers, actually look at people, and get stuff done. I don’t want to publish a series of posts on that, and many of the reasons included within are not my primary motivations for quitting.

Yes, on a certain level I am trying to walk away from the platform so that I spend my extra time reading or actually talking to people, but I’m attempting to walk away from it to test a simple thesis of mine: Facebook, as a habit, is not worth the time devoted to it.

The idea behind the thesis is simple: there’s an obvious benefit to Facebook — mostly connections with other people and visibility — but this benefit is not totally costless. The cost comes primarily in productivity lost from just scrolling through the newsfeed (like many people do while driving or bored at home), but also from misplaced resources.

Yes, I can get a lot of social benefit out of Facebook — but I can get this many other ways, too. Voxer, Google Hangouts, and iMessage are just a few example platforms that I use to talk with the people with whom I have the closest connections.

There’s also a sort of crowding-out effect that Facebook has on social lives. Because I talk to somebody on Facebook once or twice a month, I now don’t feel it is as urgent to go out and do things with them. Maybe this is good — maybe I really shouldn’t want to spend that much time out interacting with people when I can do it from the comfort of my home — but sometimes it is a loss, too. Even if the actual value of in-person interactions is overrated, there are experiences that cannot be had in the home or from the phone. Going iceskating downtown, or traversing the incline, or visiting the beach are all experiences which carry value separate from the value gained from the pure interpersonal interaction. Social media like Facebook makes it harder for us to notice this.

So I deactivated my Facebook profile this morning for a period of approximately two weeks to see how my own habits change and what things I gain value from. If my thesis is right, I’ll be less-inclined to return, despite some of the obvious benefits. If it is wrong, I’ll be happy to return, come the New Year.

Experiences Today

  • As for the actual experience of the first day off Facebook for a serial Facebooker like myself, it was a noticeable difference.
  • Twice I started typing “facebook.com” in to Chrome on my phone.
  • I spent noticeably more time on twitter and LinkedIn when trying to kill time. These platforms have a lower marginal value to me, though, and I found myself bored with them much more quickly than with Facebook. This is a good sign for my thesis.
  • I didn’t stand around wasting as much time in between sets at the gym, since I didn’t have Facebook to scroll through.
  • I’ve already felt compelled to set up coffee dates with friends in my hometown when I return next week for Christmas — at what I feel is a higher rate than usual.
  • I spent much of the day running errands, so my actual work-productivity rate is difficult to discern, though my experience in the morning was that it was higher.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this goes.

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