Lonely Lion

Remember that post a few days ago about how I quit Twitter and Facebook?  That lasted all of one month.  Why?  Well, I’m still pretty firmly quit on Twitter, despite the fact that I’ve registered a new name, but Facebook really sucks you back in.  Not for any of the things that make Facebook Facebook, like social graphs, and reconnecting with people you really don’t want to reconnect with, it’s because of all the areas of the internet that Facebook has co-opted.  The specific reason was because of a real-world archery group I belong to that only posts information, important information, like scores in an ongoing league, to Facebook.  Why do they do that?  Because Facebook is easy.

I can’t blame them, Facebook has the momentum of 25% of the internet, and has become the de facto way of organizing everything.  In the early days of the Chicago Python Users Group, there was an outcry when we started organizing the meetings through meetup.  I thought it was ridiculous, because, really…who cares?  You create an account, you RSVP for stuff.  No big deal.  The same argument is being used for organizing activities through Facebook.  The difference is, I didn’t have to constantly maintain and prune my social graph on meetup.  It was a single-use thing.  I would use it to RSVP to meetups.  That’s it.  Facebook comes with a significant amount of baggage.  Facebook is the new social graph monopoly, and it’s difficult to have any sort of networked life without an account there.

During my month away from the big two, leaving the networks came up in conversation a few times.  It was mostly an admired, wished for act.  People genuinely sympathized with leaving the networks, and pined for the act themselves.  Then they’d get quiet, and look almost scared, because leaving the networks means cutting ties with the growing number of groups that only organize themselves through those two networks.

The most common complaint I heard, “/Twitter|Facebook/ makes me constantly evaluate what I’m doing right now, and makes me thing how I can phrase it in a /Tweet|Whateverfacebookcallsatweet/.”  I agree completely, and despite my re-joining the big two, I’m not going to go back to thinking that way.

Quick edit to add a link to a NYTimes piece that sums up a lot of what I was thinking when I quit: I Tweet, Therefore I Am.  In particular, this quote: “a part of my consciousness had split off and was observing the scene from the outside: this was, I realized excitedly, the perfect opportunity for a tweet.”