Life After Facebook

I recently deleted my Facebook account.

And upon the suggestion of a friend that I write about the ensuing fallout, I decided to do just that.

Here are the top 10 ways that life is different...after Facebook.

10. Blank Stares. Because the site has become so ubiquitous, boasting more than 500 million users worldwide, most friends are baffled by your departure. It simply does not compute. "Leave Facebook?!? Whyyy??"

9. Freedom. You are no longer a slave to the status update. That means you quit thinking about your activities in terms of how they translate to Facebook. Your first thought when something funny happens is, "Hey! That's really funny!"...not "Hey! That's really funny! I gotta update my status!"

A quote from a recent story in the Washington Post highlights this weariness in communicating Facebook-style:

"I really value thoughtfulness and rigorous dialogue," says Amy Alexander, a writer in Washington. But on Facebook, "I find myself chiming in with glib asides," for the amusement of her network. "I feel like I'm getting ADHD. I feel like it's inhibiting my ability for thoughtfulness." She joined the site in the middle of 2009 and is now considering a moratorium, to get her brain back.

8. Peace of mind. You quell the nagging discomfort that you have put too much of yourself out there. In his book The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick says that Sean Parker, one of the original founders of the company, once described Facebook as being like a little device that you carry around and point at people so it will tell you all about them.

That "little device" is a virtual jackpot both for advertisers, and, by association, for Facebook itself. On a more disconcerting note, Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen refers to Facebook here as "one big database of hundreds of millions of people containing the kind of information far beyond what the secret police in 20th-century totalitarian regimes had."

Facebook isn't exactly a regime, but still, when put in those terms, I think I would like for that device to say "no signal" when it is pointed at me.

7. Effort. If you want to tell your friends something tremendously important, like, "This Starbucks latte is soooo good," then you have to talk to them. Personally. Friend by friend by friend, the way people have spoken to one other from time immemorial. Or if you want to get really fancy, you can send a mass e-mail to let them know. But there are no more opportunities for shotgun blast statuses that allow for mass, public discussion. Maybe that's good. Maybe it's not. Either way, it's another part of life-after-facebook fallout.

6. Life chapters. Goodbyes feel a little more like goodbyes. But really, that's not all bad. It just makes that out-of-the-blue conversation one day down the road much sweeter than this deflating response: "Oh yeah. I already knew that about you. I read it yesterday." Old friends may have to work harder to find you, but remember, we somehow found each other in the pre-Facebook days, too.

5. Distinction. You relish the fact that, by deleting your account, you are in no way helping Facebook achieve their long-term plan to be the world's first trillion-dollar company. Matt Cohler, former Facebook employee, says in The Facebook Effect, "In five years there won't be a distinction between being on and off Facebook. It will be something that goes with you wherever you are communicating with people."

Some of us would very much like to keep that distinction in place.

The company's ambitions conjure up flashbacks of an old cartoon about the exploits of unlikely candidates seeking global domination...Pinky and the Brain.

Pinky: "Gee Brain, what do you want to do tonight?"
Brain: "The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world!"

That doesn't seem so far-fetched anymore.

4. Productivity. No more falling down, down, down into a time-wasting abyss. Facebook users spend an average of 6 hours a month on the site, and some are even seeking clinical help for a new, nebulous condition called Facebook Addiction Disorder. (Interesting to note that the acronym for it is FAD.)

3. Blissful Ignorance. You no longer have to sift through a vast repository of minutiae. Everyone on Facebook has contributed to the repository at some point, in some way. "I just ate some chocolate-covered pretzels! MMMM!" "I really need to vacuum." "Watching American Idol!" After reading about 30 of these in a row, your eyes start to glaze over. Closely related to minutiae ignorance is oversharing ignorance, in which you don't have to learn things you wish you didn't know about people from their unfiltered, uncensored status updates.

2. Stand-Alone Experience. You don't need to take a picture...to post on Facebook...to somehow prove that the event really happened. It happened. And that's enough.

1. Space. Finally...you can breathe. Not to be gross, but the planet is getting so "connected" that you can practically smell body odor through the screen. It is as if you're standing there, squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder in the middle of a big, digital crowd. CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to make the world a "more open place." But his creation is effectively doing the opposite...making many of us feel cramped inside the cloud of the social graph, the term he uses to describe the "global mapping of everybody and how they're related."

The most important and most obvious point in all of this is that even though one "leaves" Facebook, he or she is obviously where they always have been. In that sense, nothing has changed. I did not leave my friends, I left a web site. There is a difference.

A small part of me still resides there in the form of a "community page" for The Farris Wheel, where, like an air traffic controller pointing this way, I post links to this blog for people who are interested. I always look forward to interacting with you all here. Some of you are my long-time friends, and some of you are people I have never met. Your time spent reading these posts is appreciated more than you know. If you are a "lurker", feel free to comment every now and then. This is my spot on the web now. It's kind of like moving to the country from the city. You know where to find me, and I like to know when you visit. Don't be a stranger.