Waking Up to the Web Part Two

I've quit Facebook twice.

I mentioned in my last post that I started using FB at all because I moved to another country and was lonely. I was still pretty restrictive about it, though. I kept all my posts private and only allowed as "friends" people I actually wanted to be friends with--family members and non-family whom I actually knew personally and liked. Probably no more than 100 in all.

Also, I flatter myself, I was good at what I took to be the medium: pithy one-liners that captured some aspect of the day. A friend once wrote me an email just to say how much pleasure he and his wife got out of my comment, after believing my bicycle to have been stolen, "I thought I was going to grow old with that bike..."

Well, this went on for six or seven years.

Then one day I was walking home and formulating in my mind how to capture some aspect of the day and suddenly, all in a flash, I realized that I was not living life anymore: I was ransacking it for pithy FB one-liners.

Yikes.

And I'm really, really not the kind to be susceptible to curating a perfect online version of myself. I was not depressed or filled with self-hatred or any of the usual problems associated with social media use. Furthermore, FB was the only social media I used. I restricted it to other real people I knew. And yet... it was somehow plundering my life and dehumanizing me.

We were moving back to our own country so I figured it was a good time for a clean break.

Also, I really didn't want to broadcast my reverse culture shock. (It was intense.)

However, over the course of that next year, while I was also reinventing myself professionally to accompany the move, I started a personal website, my name + .com , after being persuaded by my brother-in-law that this was neither creepy nor vain but a good way to stake my own presence online and control the publicity about myself (however modest--and it _is_ modest!), or someone else would.

I suppose now this was my first inkling of the importance of _owning_ private property on the internet. I didn't realize until recently (maybe even today) that I still don't own my web presence--I rent it. Still, better to pay for rent and have control over my own dwelling than to camp out for "free" on a social media site.

Anyway, since I was staking a public and professional presence with my website, it seemed logical and acceptable to go back to FB, this time eyes wide open as a marketing tool. Because I had realized by then that it was no longer _really_ about personal connection. I figured if I used it to raise awareness about my work, that would not break the implicit social contract.

Wrong again.

I'm not sure why... Is it because so many people _do_ use it personally and socially? or because the term "friend" still applies? or because we use emojis which suggest a more entangled relationship than a strict business one?

I don't know, only that I felt more and more weird, not less. Getting birthday wishes from total strangers who were my "friends," and then feeling annoyed at them for not following my links and investing in my projects, was just not good.

This was also well into FB's own transformation from chronological to algorithmic feed, and it didn't take long to realize that it had no interest in promoting links that took users off the site, unless I became a business officially and paid for the right to share my links. Photos still worked fine, so I resorted to handwriting URLs on posterboard and photographing myself holding it up.

Ugh.

And that's to say nothing of my trying to block out all the content FB was throwing at me to elicit my outrage and keep me scrolling.

Eventually I pared down to a bare minimum "marketing" presence on FB and figured that was the acceptable compromise, even though I still felt gross about it.

And then, glory hallelujah, a cyber philosopher came riding into my life on a white horse, brandishing a book called _Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now._