Thinking About Facebook
It’s been a long time since I posted something on Facebook that wasn’t conceived and composed to produce a particular effect in the audience reading it. I no longer feel free enough to celebrate something (anything), express disgust, or just be myself in words and pictures. I’m constantly measuring and guessing about how my thoughts will be received. As a result, I’m more concerned with the reaction to my message and how people will judge me than I am with the actual message. That’s a bad sign: I can no longer be myself.
I love that I can talk to people and follow along in their highs and lows, but I no longer feel comfortable in reciprocating their lifecasting tendency. So, once again, I return here to do those things, to be myself. I can be much more open with my successes and defeats, knowing my audience is small and that I won’t be accosting readers with too much — if people don’t like what they read here, they can simply stop visiting. I’d rather be left alone here at tumbledry than blocked and unfriended on Facebook.
Comments
John +4
Facebook has its benefits Alex, but I think you are making a solid decision to stray away from it. It’s nice to keep up with family and friends; however, how much do you really want to know? Even in my own blogging, I’ve tried so hard to get away from the “lifecasting.”
I used facebook for all the wrong reasons and frankly I don’t see many right ones anymore. I’ve see people get in trouble at work, family members hurt other family, and more personally… have it cause relationship hardship.
As we become more closely “connected” with social networking sites and smart phones, I feel we have become increasingly more disconnected. There no longer is any substance to conversations, thoughts, feelings, and relationships. If anything, it is a distraction from these very things we desire.
Good luck, my friend in real life.
Alexander Micek
Thanks for the support, John — unfortunately, I can’t promise I won’t be doing some lifecasting here, but at least it’ll be because I want to preserve the thoughts/feelings/activities for posterity and not to be chasing the transient approval of a bunch of people I’m not good at staying in touch with.
Back to Facebook: I really like sharing links on it — seems like a good way to send the exact right thing to the exact right someone. For example, I recently sent these light saber fighting kittens to Matt. I think Facebook is just about perfect for that use case.
It gives me great comfort to know I can be as boring as I want here, and people can decide to not visit, instead of me being really boring (and annoying) on a site people regularly visit and depend on.