Quitting Facebook Cold Turkey

“That sounds like a shitty assignment,” a friend told me over dinner the other day.  ”Your teacher’s making you stay off Facebook for a week and write about it?  What are you going to do, write about how you just went on Twitter instead?”

A few years ago, I noticed the trickle of people turning away from their Myspaces and going to Facebook had turned into a steady stream.  ”Myspace is for bored teenagers,” my brother told me when I asked why he didn’t have his own page.  A lot of people thought the same way; Facebook was seen as a more grown-up alternative to the cesspool of porn bots and teen scandals that Myspace had turned into.

Thus, the swarm of locusts moved on to the next fertile field: Facebook, which, in addition to attracting Myspace defectors, also appealed to a whole new demographic: people who were on no other social networking sites.  I got on Facebook about a year ago at the urging of my parents (yep, my mom was my first Facebook friend); I figured that if they liked it, I should give it a shot.  At the time, I assumed it was just like Myspace, but with these “wall update” things which sounded exactly like Twitter.  Being already on both Myspace and Twitter, Facebook sounded slightly redundant, but I gave it a go.

I’ve found that, like my parents, lots of my friends who are otherwise absent from all social networking sites have Facebook accounts.  Most of my friends are older than me; many over-40 types I’ve spoken to are scared off by the fact that Myspace got co-opted by the teenage set early on, and the one word they use in regards to Twitter is “why?”.  Most people I know use social networking for the “social” part; the “networking” bit matters little to them.  None of us have iPhones, and many of us have jobs where you can’t check the internet every five seconds, thus rendering much of Twitter moot (you must admit, it’s easier to glean useful info from Twitter if you have the ability to check it more than once a day).

I wasn’t able to post an update warning my followers of my Facebook hiatus; said hiatus began on a night when I went to school, then went to work, then my band had a show, so I was too busy to get on the internet.  The latter activity is one of the main reasons why I am itching to get back on Facebook; I get emails whenever anyone posts stuff on my Facebook, and I have had to watch silently as my bass player posts photos from the show on my wall.  I told my mom about my assignment; trying to be helpful, she got onto Facebook and began reading people’s congratulatory wall posts about my show before I could stop her (“Mom, that’s cheating!”).

A couple days into the assignment, I decided to log onto Myspace, having failed to read the fine print on the class website which said that logging onto Myspace wasn’t allowed.  What I found on Myspace, which I hadn’t been on in months, was the charred elephant-graveyard-style wreckage of a formerly buoyant social community.  Many of my friends hadn’t checked their pages in months, either.  I found very little of interest, and have been on Twitter for the past week, desperately trying to get my fix.

It was with a heavy heart that I sat down to dinner with my friend, who had been sending me taunting Tweets (“this Facebook thing is SO FUN!!!”) mocking me in my misery.  Yes, I affirmed to him, I was going on Twitter instead of Facebook, but it was proving inadequate.  Most of my Tweeple are folks from school or people in my field of study, and I’ve found over the course of this experiment that I use Facebook for the same reasons my not-so-net-savvy friends use it: Facebook is the “social” part of social networking for me, and Twitter is the “networking” part.