The No Facebook Experiment

 

Find a written version after the jump (push the blue "Read More" button below).  You may have to turn your speakers up for the video, I think I need a real microphone to do these sorts of things.

Hello, everyone, welcome to my first YouTube video ever!  Today I’m going to talk about my “No Facebook” experiment.  This isn’t anything that is new or groundbreaking, many people have done it to varying degrees of success.  But it was just something that I wanted to try for myself.

I spend a lot of time on computers and the internet, and have done so ever since fifth grade (1998!).  I was on AOL for years, and didn’t get a high speed internet connection until college in 2006.  The internet has changed a lot since 1998, and in some ways I’m not sure it’s for the better.

I joined Facebook in the summer of 2006, just after high school graduation and before going to college.  It had been open for all students with a valid .edu e-mail for a while by then, I think.  But within a few years, it seemed like everyone was on Facebook.  Want to have a study group for Human Rights law?  Make a facebook group and invite everyone.  You get the idea.  I don’t think hardly anyone but my family and my employers called me while I was in college.

But Facebook has become more than a sophisticated and free mail merge tool.  Originally when Facebook was opened to anyone above the age of 13 with an e-mail account, the big push for older members to join was the old “classmates.com” pitch:  find out what happened to old friends/classmates. 

That’s great for older folks, but for those of us who aren’t at the point in our lives where nostalgia kicks in, Facebook can quickly become a strange collection of individuals from our past that we have no intention of bringing into our future.  Yet for many people, those individuals sit on their friends list.  For 2012, the average 18-24 year old had 429 friends on Facebook.  A person at 65+ has 71.  Now this last group can maybe be explained by Betty White’s quip, “People have told me, “Betty, Facebook is a great way to get in touch with old friends!”  At my age, if I want to get in touch with old friends, I need a ouija board.”  

But I think it has more to do with the fact that at this age, you meet a lot of people who are in your life for a very short time before you part ways.  That’s the circle of life.  So we meet someone at a party, add them to Facebook, and five years later have never seen them again, but still we see pictures of their every weekend, and whatever other daily tidbits are thrown are way.  And deep down, we really wonder why we have this person on our friends list, but we can’t bring ourselves to delete them because…I don’t know!  Even though I am way below average for this group (at 143—though I have ‘culled’ many times over the years, once I was pushing 300) I still fall victim to doing this!  

In short, the fact is no one outside of your immediate family and close friends cares about who you are, what you do, and what you believe.  Unless you become famous, 99.9% of people on this planet will live out their entire lives without ever knowing who you are.  But then along came Facebook, and now we can pretend that everyone we have ever met in our lives really wants to know what we had for lunch!  Facebook displays just how egocentric humans areInstead of taking a single roll of 24 pictures on real film of a child’s first birthday, now with a digital camera Mom takes 300 and uploads them all to Facebook.

I used to be guilty of some of these things when I first started on Facebook.  But overtime, I came to the realization that no one really reads what I post on Facebook outside of a few people, and I don’t care about a lot I read in my news feed.  So, this experiment is just the next logical step in that realization:  If I don’t care, if no one else cares, why do we spend so much time on this site? 

So that’s why I’m doing it:  to see if I really lose anything by not logging on many times throughout the day.  How else would I fill my time?  That’s what I’m going to figure out.

This experiment also has a second component.  I have left Facebook silently, just deactivated the account without a word.  This is to see who—if anyone—notices my absence from the social network.  Nowadays, if you “deactivate” your account, you still show up in the lists of your friends, but as a defaultblue picture and a grayed out name.  Previously, removing yourself from Facebook via deactivation made your friends’ friend count go down by one—you.   I’m also interested to see if people try to contact me other ways such as e-mail, phone, or this blog.  I suspect this number to be close to 0.

I’m also going to try to limit computer use in general—besides, if there isn’t Facebook to dawdle on, then what is there to do on the internet, anyway?  Not much.  Maybe I’ll go outside or something.