Hello World!
By the time you read this, I will have already joined the #deletefacebook movement. This is not a decision that I made lightly just because someone thought up “hashtag delete Facebook.” It’s something that I’ve been thinking about doing for several months now.
Why? There’s many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Facebook has become increasingly more divisive over the past few years. Recently, I posted a meme on Facebook that I think said it all. It’s a quote by Jon Lovett of the “Crooked Media” podcasts “Pod Save America” and “Lovett or Leave it”:
But this meme also says something else about Facebook that I’ve discovered recently: We’ve turned our lives into a series of memes. And quizzes that tell us what fictional character we would be. And videos of cute animals, which I admit are cute, but…do I really need to see that puppy video again? We’ve all been sucked into this world of posting and re-posting the same stuff again and again, then we spend minutes or hours scrolling through that same stuff every day.
The real problem is that we’ve also stopped communicating with each other in any other way. I mentioned that I was going to delete my Facebook account and my mother essentially accused me of wanting to disengage from the world. Nope. That’s not what I want to do. I want to engage with the world in a different way. There’s a whole big wide internet out there, and there are those who only ever visit Facebook. I think that’s sad. But, it’s exactly what Facebook has planned from the beginning:
But Facebook’s nearly 2 billion users have nowhere else to go. That’s because, with a few exceptions, Facebook has managed to squash its competitors, either by cloning or acquiring them—a tactic it’s used to remain relevant and irreplaceable. For the past 14 years, since its inception, Facebook has been preparing for this very moment. And now that it’s here, the company continues to monopolize the way humans interact online.
We have allowed Facebook to take away nearly all the other avenues that we have of communicating with other people, and that bothers me. So, for me, #deletefacebook made perfect sense.