Are you on Facebook? Or perhaps it’s more proper to ask “are you still on Facebook?” J.D. Jagiello used to be:
To Whom It May Concern:
I was already tired of your rants about food, bad-hair days, roommates, feeling too many feelings, the public transit, lost IKEA tools, TV shows, wives, husbands and children and, above all, Trump (that’s like ranting about having an asshole—we all have it). I was tired of your quirky disregard of punctuation and how it’s for the olds. Guys you don’t need it to understand what I’m trying to say, so here’s your nut graf – this is about Facebook death.
I was tired of the quizzes: What Kind of Pizza Are You?
And the Inspirational Quotes. “It’s during our darkest hours we must focus on the light” (—Aristotle, supposedly). Here’s mine: “There’s no better time than now to delete.” (Position this one against a background of a man in canoe swimming away to a proxy of freedom.)
Shares about yoga, running, god? Ugh.
“Funny” kid dialogues: no. (But I’ve done it myself, yeah.)
I read your high-brow discussions about postmodernism or grammar, out of my leftover Good-For-You homework sense of obligation. I didn’t go to the right schools to be able to join in and I don’t retain information easily. I rarely felt philistine-aggressive about it; I accepted that I didn’t have the membership.
On a positive note, I always looked at your baby pictures because I like babies. I will miss the baby pictures. I won’t miss twice-a-week updates on some of those babies.
I also never got sick of memes or videos of animals, or articles about octopuses or archaeological digs or stupid but cleverly funny reviews of your mundane experiences on the bus or your convos with grandma. On a serious note: I am also passionate about health policies, and Indigenous issues in my country and have a lot of educated friends who post about it — stuff that doesn’t even make it to mainstream media — so I liked to get my information that way.
I used to post status updates on Facebook that many people found interesting or funny, and sometimes I shared opinions, and it was a good place to feel socially connected during times of isolation (a new baby, illness). But about two years ago or so, I stopped posting about anything serious, though I still asked for recommendations, innocent stuff. Occasionally—an old reflex—I would post something of more substance but then delete quickly because Facebook became the place of who knows who is watching.
I’ve tapered off my Facebook activities over the last few months. I check my feed at most once per day, and I find myself scrolling quickly past “the same old stuff”. I occasionally leave comments on some of my friends’ posts, but for the most part, I’m not getting into conversations — especially on anything faintly political — and I don’t much miss it. I stopped automatically posting links to my blog earlier this year … and only a couple of people seem to have noticed. That tracks well with my blog statistics which show very little of my traffic comes from Facebook and that number didn’t drop very far after I stopped posting links. I still use a plugin to auto-Tweet my blog posts, but outside a few Vikings fan groups, I’ve never really been interested in conversations on that platform.
Facebook’s algorithms seem to have noticed my slow disengagement, as I’m now getting reminders and notifications when friends post much more often than I remember in the past. I’m even getting the odd “Friend A responded to Friend B’s post” stuff, which is certainly a new attempt to entice me to log in again.
