The Book of the Faces redux
I deactivated my Facebook account on 18 November. I went back on briefly on Friday/Saturday just gone to let people know that I’ve gone, then deactivated the account again.
Effectively that’s 16 days without it; I haven’t found its absence a particular wrench and I don’t feel any inclination to dive back into it. The brief time I was back on did not incline me to change my mind.
So this year I’ve deactivated Facebook and completely deleted my LinkedIn account. The latter led to an immediate and drastic reduction in spam mail with no balancing downside. I’m still active-ish on Twitter, but dip into it rather than have it permanently on. I had an email discussion with a friend in the US, who has also cut her Facebook use back to the bone for much the same reasons I’ve walked away. I wrote (slightly edited):
I remember when the big thing was Usenet and email Listservers; then along came pioneers like Friends Reunited and My Space, then online forums and Google-Groups, then Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Now there’s a whole eco-system of new sites and apps. I don’t use, but millions of others do. As each new wave comes along, the old ones die off, and I wonder what the future is for Facebook. It has the momentum of its huge user-base of course, but I’m not convinced by its chances of longevity, and wonder if it will go the way of MySpace.
It also occurred to me that I have a number of friends who have never used Facebook at all and for whom this is all completely by-the-by.
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