[Infowarrior] - Facebook Exodus
Richard Forno
rforno at infowarrior.org
Mon Aug 31 00:47:33 UTC 2009
August 30, 2009
The Medium
Facebook Exodus
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30FOB-medium-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&pagewanted=print
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social
grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did,
you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she
disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned
desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was
compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.
The exodus is not evident from the site’s overall numbers. According
to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the
United States in July. But while people are still joining Facebook and
compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are
fleeing — some of them ostentatiously.
Leif Harmsen, once a Facebook user, now crusades against it. Having
dismissed his mother’s snap judgment of the site (“Facebook is the
devil”), Harmsen now passionately agrees. He says, not entirely in
jest, that he considers it a repressive regime akin to North Korea,
and sells T-shirts with the words “Shut Your Facebook.” What
especially galls him is the commercialization and corporate regulation
of personal and social life. As Facebook endeavors to be the Web’s
headquarters — to compete with Google, in other words, and to make
money from the information it gathers — it’s inevitable that some
people would come to view it as Big Brother.
“The more dependent we allow ourselves to become to something like
Facebook — and Facebook does everything in its power to make you more
dependent — the more Facebook can and does abuse us,” Harmsen
explained by indignant e-mail. “It is not ‘your’ Facebook profile. It
is Facebook’s profile about you.”
The disillusionment with Facebook has come in waves. An early faction
lost faith in 2008, when Facebook’s beloved Scrabble application,
Scrabulous, was pulled amid copyright issues. It was suddenly clear
that Facebook was not just a social club but also an expanding force
on the Web, beholden to corporate interests. A later group, Harmsen’s
crowd, grew frustrated last winter when Facebook seemed to claim
perpetual ownership of users’ contributions to the site. (Facebook
later adjusted its membership contract, but it continues to integrate
advertising, intellectual property and social life.) A third wave of
dissenters appears to be bored with it, obscurely sore or just somehow
creeped out.
My friend Alex joined four years ago at the suggestion of “the coolest
guy on the planet,” she told me in an e-mail message. For a while,
they cultivated a cool-planet online gang. But then Scrabulous was
shut down, someone told her she was too old for Facebook, her teenage
stepson seemed to be losing his life to it and she found the whole
site crawling with mercenaries trying to sell books and movies. “If I
am going to waste my time on the Internet,” she concluded, “it will be
playing in online backgammon tournaments.”
Another friend, who didn’t want his name used, found that Facebook
undermined his whole notion of online friendship. “It’s easy to think
of your circle of ‘Friends’ as a coherent circle, clear and moated,
when in fact the splay of overlap/network makes drip/action painting a
better (visual) analogy.” Something happened to this drip painting
that he won’t discuss. He said, “Postings that seem private can
scatter and slip unpredictably into a sort of semipublic status.”
That friend was not the only Facebook dissenter who was reticent about
specifics. Many seem to have just lost their appetite for it: they
just stopped wanting to look at other people’s photos and résumés and
updates, or have their own subject to scrutiny. Some ex-users seemed
shaken, even heartbroken, by their breakups with Facebook. “I
primarily left Facebook because I was wasting so much time on it,” my
friend Caroline Harting told me by e-mail. “I felt fairly detached
from my Facebook buddies because I rarely directly contacted them.”
Instead, she felt as if she stalked them, spending hours a day looking
at their pages without actually saying hello.
But then came the truly weird part: “Facebook was stalking me,”
Harting wrote. One day, on another Web site, she responded to an
invitation to rate a movie she saw. The next time she logged on to
Facebook, there was a message acknowledging that she had made the
rating. “I didn’t appreciate being monitored so closely,” she wrote.
She quit.
Julie Klam, a writer and prolific and eloquent Facebook updater, said
in her own e-mail message, “I have noticed the exodus, and I kind of
feel like it’s kids getting tired of a new toy.” Klam, who still posts
updates to Facebook but now prefers Twitter for professional
networking, added, “Facebook is good for finding people, but by now
the novelty of that has worn off, and everyone’s been found.” As of a
few months ago, she told me, Facebook “felt dead.”
Is Facebook doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by
zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers
picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit?
Sad, if so. Though maybe fated, like the demise of a college clique.
Points of Entry: This Week’s Recommendations
THE QUIT Put “Why I Quit” into Google, and the search engine proposes
you look into both “Why I Quit Facebook” and “Why I Quit Church.” If
you aim to be a lapsed social networker, wikiHow, the collaborative
how-to guide, provides a useful step-by-step way to disengage,
emotionally and practically: wikihow.com/quit-facebook.
AN INQUIRY You’re not the first to think it’s creepy to have your
personal life commercialized. Jürgen Habermas has been especially
eloquent about this. Start with “The Theory of Communicative Action.”
Copies are available on AbeBooks.com. Also interesting on this score:
“The Purchase of Intimacy,” by Viviana Zelizer.
GET BOARD ONLINE Scrabble is alive and well in cyberspace. If you like
Scrabble, try lexulous.com. For backgammon: ItsYourTurn.com.
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