from · me · to · you

I want to delete my facebook and have good reason to. I'm not using it for my election. I've decided against it. So it is now—officially—meaningless to have it available.

As I've reminded myself for the umpteenth time it's a terrible instrument of self-pity and procrastination. What do I do when I'm on facebook? Judge people, spy on ex-boyfriends, and avoid my Drawing homework for two more hours. See what I'm inching towards? It is absolutely worthless, facebook. From my perspective, at least.

When I quickly logged on today I saw that they redid their Interface. I was horrified. The original Interface changed—the one that everyone was reviled over—was decent. But the new one lacks any and all design sense that I know exists. It's a dilapidated mess of buttons, icons, pictures, and thumbnails flying at you in all directions. It's facebook gosh-darnit, that's what it's about! Social immersion!

Which is another reason why the new design was utterly affronting to me; I love you all but I really do not want to know what you are doing what you are doing with every second of your life. (Don't think I'm counting you out of this, Twitter!) I really don't see the point. I do not know what other important people in my life are doing; I don't know what my sisters are doing, what my mother is doing, what my father is doing, or what my three best friends are doing. I really do not need to know. Usually, in times when I remain ignorant of what they are doing... everything is fine. No one dies. Order remains. Peace reigns over the galaxy. I don't feel disconnected or socially suffocated because I've been denied someone's 160 (180?) character sentence telling me that they are doing X with Y in Z. I do not understand why you all feel like you need to subject yourself to that for so many hours in a day. Is it interesting? Hardly; the majority of your life is mundane because the majority of your life is probably spent just getting by.

And we all know how that is.

Plus it's a soul-sucking leech on the side of culture. What we're seeing with facebook is visual and artistic pollution. Facebook has billions of photos and probably only a fraction of a percent of those is quality enough to be considered worth archiving let alone, artistic. (And if your response is: "Well I don't take photograph to make art," my question to you is, "Your life isn't interesting or meaningful enough to become art at the single snap of a camera?") Facebook profiles are saturated with either A, the non-conformists, B, the ones who don't realize they are projecting a message of just how dull and woebegone they really are or, C, the ones who have wasted all our times by not filling the profile in. (Who do you think you are!?) Facebook is a mishmosh of virtually everything Western society is: individuals who really aren't all that individual-like.

And that's kinda why I hate it.

So upon my brief return to facebook after months of break, I felt alienated. While it very quickly drew me in, it was awkward. It was also strange, perhaps titillating! With facebook being so foreign to me at the point of my return, I immediately realized just how voyeuristic it was. Why was I looking at your conversations? Why did I care about your interests outside the ones you share and normally advertise, and how do your pictures to Rome really deserve fifteen minutes of my life? I'm sorry. I apologize. I can't possibly understand the appeal. If anything, facebook has become revolting to me. I don't want to know. I want to live, I don't want to "network" and that's sadly what life is becoming I fear.

Anyway, the point of this lament is that I'm still so shackled to the mere illusion that I still need facebook that I have scared myself into not deleting it. "But how will you make friends at the upcoming chapter in your life," I shout in my head. My answer should be just as loud: "The old fashion way!" I again lament that I don't need a facebook. I again repeat that I find its presence increasingly encroaching upon the most basic privacy of any and all who own one. And I again say—as I say with many other activities—you could be spending your time doing many, many more interesting, important, or productive things.

Like reading actual books. Or staring at the actual faces of others. I don't know; skies the limit.