Leaving Facebook?

In the immortal words of Fiddler on the Roof-- "Unheard of!  Absurd!"  But in reality, I've heard more and more murmurs of discontent with the social network leviathan recently.  Whether from my peers' discontent with how much it's changed since we were in college, or from deeper philosophical sources like the blog excerpt below, that discontent raises good questions.  I've just pulled a tiny bit of Dan's writing on the matter:

so why did i leave facebook? haha. all in all it was a personal decision. all the arguments above weighed heavily on and largely influenced the train of thought that led me to now. which is why i spent so much time explaining them (hopefully i did it coherently enough). for the most part facebook was full of conversations about nothing. it’s a metaphor for narcissism among other things. we’ve recreated ourselves anew in the image of our ego. or rather we are created in the image of our technology. so we create our own gods. so perhaps all this is a really perverted form of vanity for we are idolizing ourselves. obviously this was not mine or anyone else’s intent upon first entering the medium but that’s why its significant to understand the metaphor. on facebook, you can be a new person. you can be a different person. you can be you! of course a person can seemingly use it responsibly but it still doesn’t justify how one imposes upon oneself a meaningless and impotent metaphor for being.


there’s also the argument for facebook being a rolodex of sorts, enabling us to keep in touch with people despite time and distance, you know, social networking. to this, each his/her own i suppose. but again i would set forth the argument of the impact of globalism. back in the day people’s communities were local. they sent letters to those far away or they didn’t and that was that. their narratives were stronger in that the wellness of their community was contingent upon the intimacy and proximity of its members. by stronger narratives i mean they had stories to tell. this idea of narrative warrants another post in and of itself but by and large its power is lost on us today. we no longer tell stories because there’s no need for it in a globalized community. which is why keeping in touch is a weak excuse when we do not even know our neighbors next door. unfortunately its all things local that suffer and the idea of ‘neighbor’ is fast becoming a social artifact. and of course the ramifications of such runs deep and wide especially when that jesus guy mentions a lot about it..neighbors. we have to wonder whether its the words that need redefining or if its something larger and systemic that needs fixing.


 if one is honest with themselves it is in fact a lie and a selfish thing to think facebook provides a way of community. at least this is what i found to be true for myself. sorry, i shall try my best not to universalize my experiences. the people i care about that are not local to me i already keep in touch with through means other than facebook. but i know i can do better. but i have not in the past because there was always the ease of facebook. it is in fact a crutch to genuine relationship. not quantity but quality. an example. recently someone sarah and i know and love became pregnant. instead of learning of it on facebook, we were graced with a call from the source herself. of course, if we were on facebook, we would’ve learned about it all the sooner but by eliminating the medium that stood between us, it made the learning of that knowledge and the experience of it that much more visceral. that much more poignant. that much more real.