Can you quit Facebook?

Yesterday a lawyer friend of mine – on Facebook and in real life – announced she was shutting down her Facebook account for good.

Like others, she could not accept Facebook’s invasion on her privacy, data mining, and selecting which of her posts friends would see based on algorithms.

Perhaps a little callous, but I felt that was her loss. If she didn’t want to use cell phones like the rest of us, she’d find herself less in touch with those around her. Admittedly, I’ll miss the provocative way she took on issues.

Selena Larson (@selenalarson), social reporter for ReadWrite, writes this morning why she cannot quite Facebook.

Larson quit Facebook a few months ago because of the same privacy concerns.

In order to use Facebook to stay in touch with people, I am giving it access to my own personal life on the Internet. Facebook knows what movies I like, where I live, who my best friends are, and what apps I use, because I have spent the last seven years giving it that information. Now that I’ve decided I prize my privacy more than my posts, it’s too late to back out.

……

Facebook is no longer just a place for friends, but a pervasive and invasive identity manager. The social network wants to be privy to what we do online, and control who gets that information. Facebook may be where my friends hang out, but it isn’t my friend.

Without Facebook, Larson found a  sense of loneliness, a fear of missing out.

…I’ve felt somewhat alone. I suppose that could mean that I’m a terrible friend who has trouble maintaining long distance-relationships because of my selfish nature, or it means that Facebook does indeed strengthen our friendships, whether we want to admit it or not. I’ll concede that a little bit of both are true, and both factors contributed to my loneliness.

……

So many of the relationships I valued in the past were reduced to Facebook friends after years of liking and commenting on statuses. And I really missed them. I made it my mission to strengthen those friendships by focusing more on the real interaction—calling someone or sending more personal photos in a text message instead of an Instagram post—and building up those relationships that had been reduced to a Like button.

My friends on Facebook are life long personal friends and relatives. They’re also business friends and aquantinances I’ve had the good fortune of getting to know since leaving the practice of law and becoming part of this crazy tech world.

I’m willing to trade privacy for the rewards of deepening relationships with my friends and aquantinances. I couldn’t imagine a world where I’d limit engagement with the people I lean on and learn from.

Right or wrong, Facebook is perhaps the leading modality for personal engagement in the world. To not use Facebook, people are apt not to have the relationships of those who do.

British anthropologist and psychologist, Robin Dunbar, quoted by Larson, is right.

I suspect that Facebook’s one great contribution has been to slow down that rate of relationship decay by allowing us to keep in touch with friends over long distances.

Can you quit Facebook? I cannot.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Ludovic Bertron