I deleted my Facebook on October 1, 2012. I will preface this article by saying that as the Web Editor of Oyster magazine, pretty much my whole existence is based online. My primary hobby is the internet. My favourite pastime in summer is strategically placing two fans on either side of my face and surfing the world wide web (in winter, heaters serve the same function). ‘Surfing’ is a sport.
Reluctantly migrating from MySpace in 2007 to Facebook – then a social network synonymous with boring people who didn’t understand the importance of glitter graphics in expressing one’s identity- my use of Facebook eventually became seamless in my everyday existence. I studied Digital Cultures at university and one quote in particular resonated with me – “we are no longer online or offline, we are simply awake or asleep.” Crazy when you think about it, which is why it’s easier not to.
I would wake up at 7am, and the first thing I would do was roll over to the precious angel nuzzled close to my chest – my iPhone. Still half-asleep, my first interaction with the the world around me would be scrolling through my newsfeed. What have I missed in the 6 hours that I had been asleep? I wish I didn’t have to sleep so I could constantly be on Facebook / what if I could get an iPhone built into my wrist so I could constantly be on Facebook / what if I WAS Facebook, I would think as I subconsciously clicked through to the profile of a girl I had met once (in real life) to survey her photo album called “Bali trip 2012 yewwww”. She got a henna tattoo and hair braids. Not in a funny way. I felt satisfied with this newly acquired information and continued my day, actively on Facebook until my eyes shut and I passed out from screen exhaustion.
Books became boring; nothing was as entertaining (and engulfing) as watching people’s life decisions – for better or worse – unfold before my eyes. Oh, what’s that? “Settling in for a night on the couch with the boy, The Notebook and bickies and cheese <3” Please, tell me more. Besides using it as a vehicle to ‘stay in touch’ with people I never spoke to in high school, my other use for Facebook was to keep tabs on where my frenemies had recently checked in (oh, hell no, I am not going within a 5km radius of Oxford St tonight) and to attempt to tune boys (which never worked. Apparently the wink-face emoticon is not as flirtatious as I had once assumed.)
I was complicit in the situation too, live-blogging my Exciting And Important Life – “At home watching the Rock Eisteddfod, god these kids can move,” I would type, waiting for the likes to roll on in. Got a new haircut? Better take a selfie – this light in my bedroom is really working in my favour right now. But I’d also find myself doing actually insane stuff like looking through photos of an ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend to see if she was hotter than me. She has painfully pretty eyes, I’d think as I dipped my hand into the depths of a Doritos packet, cheese residue staining my keyboard. This counts as socialising. Crunch, crunch, crunch.
Basically, the pervasiveness of Facebook was creating a lot of negi energy in my life. I began to feel myself weighed down just by knowing. I was never like, “Wow, I just had such a cool/fun/quirky time on Facebook.” I was more like, “Wow, what have I been doing for the last three hours? Oh, that’s right, nothing except accidentally learning everyone’s surnames.”
The thing that made me decide to leg it, though, was the security controversy in September. Some users claimed that private messages sent between 2007-2009 were showing up on their Timeline. Facebook issued a response: “Our engineers investigated these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users’ profile pages.” Facebook claimed that there was user confusion due to how different the interface was in 2007 – there was no comment feature and the ‘like’ button hadn’t been invented yet. As such, users would write each other highly personal comments. Facebook, at the time, apparently wasn’t built to lurk other people (crazy, I know). The Guardian reports that amid this controversy, Facebook’s share price fell 9.1% to $20.79 – for a business that’s worth an estimated $100 billion plus, that’s, like, Kanye and Kim proportions of kash.
I looked back through my Timeline during these years. Do you even know how much of a dickhead I was in the years 2007-2009? I wanted to get a Hole back piece. I wanted to permanently etch Courtney Love lyrics into my skin. Imagine, then, all of the inane shit I would’ve said online, naively believing that it would disappear into this magical ether. And that’s the crux of the whole thing – there is no ether. Even though none of my private messages were visible on my Timeline (as far as I could tell), just reading the cringe-worthy wall comments from that period of my life was enough for me to instigate permanent deletion. “Your friends will miss you…” Facebook warned me upon my cyber suicide.
I did some research and came across an analogy about Facebook which spoke to me: “Picture this: You’re going to a party at your friend’s house. From what you’ve heard around town, it’s going to be one of the coolest parties in years, and, when you get there, all the hype is warranted. Good friends of yours are there, along with old flames and people from high school you haven’t seen in years… But then the Pizza Hunt executives come out. Imagine being at a very fun party only to be shocked when you realise that the entire time you’ve been there, a Pizza Hut focus group has been watching you from behind two-way mirrors. For hours and hours, you thought you were merely having a good time with your friends. In fact, the party was an elaborate sleight of hand, a device to get a lot of people in one place in order for a brand to better sell them things. Doesn’t sound so fun, does it?”
It can be argued that today, Facebook is as essential in day-to-day life as water and shelter. We have to pay for both of those things, so why don’t we have to pay for Facebook? This is because Facebook essentially owns your data. The Term Of Service states that Facebook has a “worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook” (section 2.1), but it also states that if you don’t keep your information up to date and accurate (section 4.5), they can terminate your account (section 13). I suggest George Orwell’s 1984 as some light holiday reading.
I’m not trying to encourage you to delete your Facebook. I’m all for adults living autonomously. For me, though, it was the right thing to do. Shit got too real. If you can restrain yourself and separate reality from Facebook – well done, here’s a gold star and a red frog. It is unsettling that it had to be a legit life decision whether to delete – weighing up the pros and cons, much like I imagine what getting married or buying a car would be like. A week in – at the risk of sounding like a Jenny Craig testimonial – I felt lighter, happier, more myself. I would love to say that since I have deleted Facebook I have moved into a shared creative space and embarked on a craft-based body of work pertaining to my self-realisation, however this is not the case. It’s not like I even really have any more free time – how did I even find time to use Facebook in the first place?
Ingrid Kesa is a writer from Sydney. She was once a Pedestrian intern but now she’s the Web Editor at Oyster Magazine. She tweets here.
