I’ve decided to deactivate my Facebook account. To be more precise, one of my two Facebook accounts.
Back in 2007 I had created a Facebook profile under my real name, David Intrator. But this account has pretty much lain dormant since early 2009
when I created another profile under the pseudonym of Carlos Mandelbaum. This second profile has, for a number of reasons, remained my primary if not exclusive Facebook identity.
The story of Carlos Mandelbaum and his Carnival of Ideas is an interesting one, but I’ll leave it for another time.
What I want to talk about here is why I’ve decided to deactivate the Carlos Mandelbaum account, and how I might give Facebook another try, but with a whole new approach.
First let’s talk about my Facebook “friends.”
Who are my Facebook “friends”?
My friends fall into four basic categories:
People I don’t know
This group makes up the vast bulk of my Facebook friends, about 60%. Many were acquired when I first launched the Carlos Mandelbaum page and quickly wanted to seed an audience for The Carnival of Ideas.
Others friended me when I was involved in Occupy Wall Street where I enjoyed a few minutes of pseudo-celebrity as a saxophonist with the legendary drum circles.
On account of Facebook’s algorithms, these friends rarely if ever appear on my newsfeed, and I never seek them out.
Some time ago I began a project of de-friending them, but stopped because it was tedious and time-consuming.
People I do know but don’t like
These are people I know causally, mostly through the advertising business, and comprise about 30% of my Facebook friends.
I might have friended them in the initial Carlos audience recruit, or for business reasons, believing it might be to some advantage to have them visible to me and me visible to them.
Most of them I was never close to or particularly fond of in real life, and my opinion of them is no higher on Facebook. I’m sure they feel the same about me, if they think about me at all.
These folks occasionally appear on my newsfeed, kissing one another’s asses or promoting their advertising agencies and careers.
I find their presence annoying.
People I know and like
Though not close friends in real life, these are people I actually know in real life—some better than others—and for whom I have a certain amount of affection and respect. They make up about 18% of my Facebook friends.
They appear on my feed, but as I’ll explain a bit later, the more they post the less I seem to like them.
Real friends
This select group makes up no more than 2% of my friends.
They are people I’ve known for quite some time in real life and with whom I have some real history. They appear on my newsfeed and I often give them Facebook “likes,” independent of the nature of the content they are posting, simply as a vote of attention and support.
Facebook is like a bad party
With so many people I don’t know, don’t like or don’t care about, and with so many people I once liked who are becoming more and more diminished in my eyes on account of their posts, for me the Facebook experience is like being at a really bad party where everyone is either a stranger or a jerk. (Twitter, by contrast, is more like a bad acid trip—more on that in another essay.)
What’s worse, the Facebook party is held in a bad venue. Viewed on desktop computers, Facebook pages are ugly, confusing and claustrophobic. Things are a bit cleaner on the iPhone, but there remains an unpleasant residue from the desktop version. And on either platform, we’re all constrained to tiny boxes which literally make us all equally small in stature.
At the Facebook party all we’re just data. Pre-formatted commodities.
The more you post, the less likable you become
I was referring to this earlier, and it’s an interesting phenomenon which adds to the overall depressing vibe of the Facebook experience:
The more I learn about the people I like, the less I like them.
At times it has to do with what they post. I might learn that someone I thought I liked holds obnoxious political views or has a subtle anti-semitic streak. Or they might post pictures of what they eat, which, considering the number of hungry people in the world, I find callous and offensive. Or they might be among the many who feel obliged to post hackneyed motivational maxims.
Then again, they may simply fall victim to an affliction suffered by many Facebook users, namely, the compulsion to be clever and witty, which might be tolerable if in fact what they posted was either clever or witty.
The best explanation, however, may have to do with the act of posting itself, which reveals on their part a neediness and insecurity that reminds me of my own.
I crave the “likes”
I’ve done my fair share of posting on Facebook. I try to post original content wherever I can, either photos I’ve taken, music I’ve performed or essays like the one you’re reading right now.
At times I’ll share an article I find in The New York Times or Slate.com, mostly regarding politics and culture. And I don’t just post anything. I try to make sure that whatever I put up has some legitimate artistic or intellectual merit.
Although it would be foolish to assume that everyone would give my posts a “like,” I’m nonetheless disappointed when these posts receive little or no attention.
See, if you’re not liked, well… you’re not liked.
And you can’t help but feel rejected, especially if you’re proud of what you’ve posted or have some creative or emotional investment in it.
It’s hard to admit, but I really do crave the “likes.” And when they don’t come, I feel bad, despite what I might tell myself otherwise.
To make matters even more psychologically confusing, I’m feeling bad about getting rejected by people who, for the most part, I don’t give a damn about.
It all ends up making me feel insecure, alienated and lonely.
After a while you have to ask “What’s the Point?”
Over the last few months I found myself spending quite a lot of time on Facebook, checking into it regularly throughout the day.
But now I’ve decided to take a break, at least as Carlos Mandelbaum.
This is not the first time I’ve withdrawn. There have been a number of occasions in the past when I’ve spent up to a week dropping into Facebook for just a few seconds a day, if at all.
This time however, I’ve been a bit more decisive, deactivating the account. Sure, It’s no big deal to reactivate it, but in my head things feels different.
I’ve still got a Facebook page as David Intrator, but I’ve only gone to it briefly over the last day to review my list of friends, and have yet to post or reach out to anyone.
See, at the moment I just don’t get the point.
The social media concept trumps the social media experience
I’m fascinated by social media as a concept. I like reading about it, thinking about it and exploring it. I’m on Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube and most recently began using Vine, the 6-sec video app.
But as exciting as social media is conceptually, I’m far less enthused about the actual experience.
It’s always somewhat of a letdown. Despite the hype by people like Thomas Friedman who claim that the web is enabling the emergence “super-empowered individuals,” my social media experience has only dramatized the vastness of the internet itself and my insignificance within it. The sheer number of people out there, each clamoring for attention and love—all of this tends to make me feel tiny, alienated and alone.
But a new strategy may offer hope
Despite my misgivings, I haven’t given up hope. In theory at least, social media should be able to provide me with something meaningful and valuable.
Perhaps the scale of my social media universe is the problem. Addressing a large audience—-and the expectations that come with that—is quite different from addressing a smaller group of friends and peers.
So I’m going to perform an experiment. The first thing I’ll do is cull down my friends.
I’ve already begun this process with my Twitter followers. I’m un-following anyone who doesn’t tweet something I find genuinely interesting. If you’re tweeting about what you had for dinner, you’re gone. Motivational sayings will also get you the boot.
I have yet to do this on Facebook, but I’ll be getting to it soon.
Facebook as a social medium, not a broadcast platform
The goal is to have just a small group of Facebook friends, all of whom I genuinely care about.
Among this trusted group of friends “likes” should become irrelevant. There would be little incentive to project or sell oneself.
In this more intimate context the trivial might even become significant because the people with whom your are sharing it are significant.
Facebook will be a purely social medium rather than a broadcast platform, a place to share ideas and feelings rather than market them.
It might even provide us with a small semblance of what we want from a social life.
I’m not sure it it will work, but I’m going to give it a try.