My life, well-lived

I swore I was never going to get involved with Facebook.

For a long time, I resisted. This was partly for privacy reasons (though ironically, one of the people who in the end convinced me to sign up through multiple invites was one of my favorite InfoSec professors), but mostly it was because I didn’t want my information overload problem to get any worse.

Call it my fear of artificially induced A.D.D.

And when an old-school lifelong friend of mine tried to talk me into it, I resisted that too, at least initially. But then, after finding out how much of my high school class was online and knowing my twenty-year reunion was coming up, I succumbed. And as much as aspects of it annoyed me, being able to talk to wonderful people I hadn’t seen in decades was great.

Email requires consciously contacting people. Facebook was like passing people in the hallway and getting a little window on their lives – the choice to comment (or not) was mine. And, to be quite honest, it’s allowed me some RL opportunities that not being on Facebook wouldn’t have (mostly, the chance to see old friends who wouldn’t have known where I was otherwise as they passed through Denver or Munich).

There’s a reason even rational people sell their attention and privacy to Mark Zuckerberg.

That doesn’t make a good idea, but there’s a reason for it.

In this world where we all abandon the villages which would have helped us become adults, raise our children, be families, and grow old together, in some sense, Facebook allows us to reconstruct those villages, if imperfectly. I see my friends’ kids grow from across an ocean, get parenting advice from old friends, laugh with people I love. Especially in my situation, where my meager support system was completely obliterated by moving to another continent and where the language around me isn’t the one I dream in, it’s had particular value.

But… I know better.

Facebook’s sole interest in keeping your information private begins and ends with keeping you around so that they can sell your attention and your data. (This is the same, let’s face it, for any “free” service provider – *ahem* Google *cough*) If the pull of the relationships you’re maintaining is much stronger than your desire to keep your information private – or if the policy is confusing enough that you think your information is private when it isn’t – you’ll stick around, and they can continue doing whatever they do with your data. And given that they change their privacy policies on a daily basis, well, generally, Facebook wins that battle.

I’m a smart girl – I know better – and yet I know I’ll lose touch with some people I adore when I leave.

It’s not their fault – life is incredibly busy, and while you may love browsing the pictures of your high school locker partner when you can do it casually, contacting her directly is work. After a long day of work and kids and commutes and blah blah blah, who needs more work? Sometimes, reading a whole blog post seems like work.

Of course, that’s probably because we’ve all had our attention spans shattered by reading mass quantities of Twitter and Facebook updates. I find myself skimming posts because of it that I would have read before. In fact, I’m going to be shocked if anyone reads this far.

But.

Rationality has to win out eventually. I hope – I sincerely hope – friends will still make contact with me once I’ve deleted my Facebook account tonight. I know lots of folks will try to talk me out of it, but it’s the right thing to do. Call it reallocation of attention and an attempt to control which information Facebook owns about me in the future.

(N.B. Even if Facebook claims (and I don’t know that they even do) to delete all information associated with an account, one would be a fool to believe they actually do.)

Look, as a person, I’m actually not all that private, but I am intensely aware of what I make public when I tweet or post here. But because Facebook feels like you’re having private conversations with your closest 300 friends, you tend to have the private conversations you wouldn’t have on public channels. And Facebook has – and keeps – all of that information.

Not good.

It’s the price you’re paying to chat with your bandmate from senior year.

So: much as I am going to miss contact with friends, I’m deleting my account. I need – and want – to reallocate my attention away from Facebook.

I’m not disappearing from the Internet – I’m not even completely avoiding Short Attention Span Theater (i.e. I’ll still be on Twitter) – but I’m going to delete my Facebook account for good.

So, old pals, if you’ve read this far (or you find this post later) and you still want to find me…

Blog: http://blog.kgrothoff.org
Website: http://kgrothoff.org
Email: krista at kgrothoff dot org
Twitter: @kristamonster

Skype and RL phone calls on request (the latter cost me nothing in a large part of the world), snail mail address available if you email me.

I’ll delete the account late tonight CEST. I have very mixed feelings, but I’ve been threatening to do this for more than a year and never go through with it. No, I don’t think I’m so important that this has a major impact on anyone’s life, but there are some beloved people with whom I have only maintained contact with through Facebook that I don’t want to disappear from without a trace.

N.B. I’m well aware there are other alternatives developing out there – Diaspora, for one. We’ll see. And Twitter has its own issues, but that’s for another post.