book of face

I’ve received about 10 of them over the past year. Generic e-mails, telling me so and so would like to be my friend on Facebook or wants to show me photos, but I would have to join, here’s the link. I delete the message. Occasionally there is another mail reminding me of who has already invited me to join, 6 people, neatly listed with a photo. To the trash it goes. More often even I’ve had to answer the question face to face: “Why are you NOT on Facebook?” I shrug and say, it sucks up too much time. I don’t like it. But really…
Why am I not?
It would be beneficial. As an ex-pat you can easily stay in touch with a lot of people in the old country and friends and acquaintances across the US. You can see what they are up to, they know what your are working on. They can even see where you’ve been, by looking at the photos you post and the video. You can turn it into a great marketing tool for your business. After all I am a free-lancer, I like to communicate, to write, to photograph and to stay in touch.
Why am I nowhere to be found on Facebook?
Because I can. Because I allow myself the luxury of it. Because I like that, a lot. To not be found. To not let everyone know what I am up to on a daily, weekly basis. To not throw out my likes and dislikes, my favorite websites, bands and movies, my photos, my friends or virtual friends for all the millions on Facebook to see. Yes, I can change the privacy settings and limit access to most of my information to only the select few. But how do I select? What does it mean if I do not accept friend requests of dozens of people, while I allow others? And would I be able to stand only having 50 instead of 500 friends, which would probably be an enviable sign of my online popularity? Isn’t that why people do it, to show how many they know, to network? To connect for business or social gain?
I guess I could spend a little time to find answers to these questions, come to my own conclusions and design my FB presence accordingly. But there is one more thing, that is hard to overcome. Facebook caters to the hard-wired peeping tom instincts in humans. It feels weird. You click through people’s pages and there is all this stuff, their photos, their friends, their descriptions, their updates. Who are these people? Who do they know? What does it say about them? Do they just play, portray a version of themselves they think is cool, fun, interesting? All pretense, no reality? How does the Facebook version relate to the real person? Why am I even clicking through this, what am I looking for, why should that interest me?
It feels strange and wrong to browse through Facebook (which I obviously have done, I am a journalist after all and I do not like to be completely ignorant of the facts). To snoop around all these people’s profiles. Gossip fodder. It feels like I am sitting again in the archives of the Stasi or looking through some FBI file, browsing through their compilations of people’s life. Most of those reports are as well meaningless accumulations of everyday life. Yet they were important for a regime, they used to make a political system feel safe about its citizens, they gave the government the feeling of control over someone who raised suspicion. All the mundane banalities of everyday life became meaningful not to last because they were printed in black and white on hundreds of pages of paper, complemented by secretly shot photos, compiled over years and then in their quantity signifying control over another person’s life.
I know, on Facebook, the reports are just posted on a server, in color, reported not by secret agents but by the subjects themselves. They want the world to know. Why am I thinking of the Stasi? The FBI? It is a big and heavy comparison without much rational base only justified by one thing – the way it makes me feel.
Facebook makes me cringe. I don’t want to be one those reporting on themselves. I am a thoroughly modern person, loving my gadgets, the unfathomable change of human existence through the digitization of information, my Wired subscription, heck, my blog! I just don’t like Facebook because I don’t like how it feels to me and what it does to you as a person in constant need to feed that virtual existence to all the “friends” out there with stuff that somehow is supposed to mean something.
It doesn’t to me, so I remain off Facebook.