[Infowarrior] - Facebook Exodus

[Richard Forno]

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.