Officially quit facebook at 6:34pm, Friday October 8th. (according to the "I'm quitting" status message.)
A few observations I made note of in the first couple of days:
Saturday, October 09, 2010. ~1:30 a.m. Roughly seven hours without facebook.
Observation #1: I prefer to share pictures with people by posting them on facebook and directing friends to the appropriate album.
This came up because I rented a viola on Friday, and was telling a friend (who played viola for years, and who currently lives in a different state,) about it. He asked me to describe the bow, to which I replied: "Uhmm… it's a bow?" I would like to take a picture of it for him, and I immediately thought "I'll just post it on Face… oh, wait." Guess he'll be getting an e-mail.
October 9, 2010 2:54 am
Observation #2: Feels like there's a lot less to do online.
October 9, 2010 1:20 pm
Observation #3: the bookmark for facebook is the first one on my bookmarks bar. The original placement was actually as a filler, to push other bookmarks more mid-screen so they were easier to find and get to (this was probably part of my adjustment to a widescreen laptop.) However, facebook is usually the first page I open anyways, and force of habit tried to open it today. I moved the bookmark to the other end of the bar. Make it just a tiny bit less convenient.
Currently, having logged back into facebook after almost a week without.
Beyond the observations above, I had a periodic urge when I was online to check facebook, just to see if I had any messages or notifications. Other than some of the mindless games, I mainly started using facebook because there are people who use it to get in touch with me.
I logged back into facebook earlier today. I had eight notification, none of which were anything important, which disappointed me. It is the same feeling as getting a text message, hoping that it is from a certain someone, and it being one of those nonsense chain texts. There were also two event invites, neither of which were overly important, and some 70 requests for the game apps (Farmville, CafeWorld, etc.)
Overall, I didn't have any serious "facebook withdrawals," but I did have to adjust to not automatically going to it for the games and such. It was mostly a matter of breaking a habit - one that I didn't know I had until this past week.
How can you use your experience and observations to speculate on the role of facebook and social networking in our lives? What does it mean that you (and most of your classmates) logged back on to find nothing much of import?
ReplyDeleteAlthough I don't use Facebook, I can understand that some people do use it for important purposes. But still, one week shouldn't be too hard. Those who do go through a "Facebook withdrawal" should really step back and examine how much of their time is being consumed on this site. Nice blog post!
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