Why I’ve Deactivated
My Facebook Account
“Are you sure you want to deactivate your account? These friends will miss you.”
Facebook’s last attempt at perpetuating the illusion that Facebook is a crucial part of modern social life, showing pictures of friends whose email addresses I still know by heart. I scrolled down, selected the option to automatically reactivate my account after 28 days, and clicked Confirm.
The experiment has begun.
I’m not anti-Facebook, even though I’m highly skeptical of the privacy implications and the economic reality of the internet where the peers provide value, but the platform reaps all the income. See:
The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive ‘value abundance’? by Michel Bauwens, a P2P-theorist and founder of the P2P Foundation
They are exploiting us! Why we all work for Facebook for free by University of Essex professors Chris Land and Steffen Böhm
My 1 month deactivation of Facebook is not an act of rebellion, but an act of curiosity. I try to do a few 30 day challenges every year, and this is simply one of them. Since right now, I’m not managing or monitoring any pages on Facebook professionally, it’s the perfect time.
Let me lay out my reasons for taking a break.
I want to understand the impact on my social life
I’m a serial expat. I have friends in many places and tend to travel a lot. I reckon I could well have forgotten about many people if it wasn’t for Facebook, and they would have forgotten about me. I guess our instinct for loss aversion makes us see that as a bad thing, but perhaps it’s for the best and frees up mental space. I wonder if my connection to friends will become more genuine or will remain the same, if I’ll spend more time with friends who don’t really use Facebook, and whether I’ll experience loneliness and isolation or the opposite.
I spent the winter traveling through Thailand and Vietnam and have been sharing a lot of stories, ideas, and photos through Facebook with my friends and family in Moscow, The Netherlands, the UK, the US and other places. As a result, I never felt far away, never felt detached, but it brings me to my next point.
I want to understand the impact on my mind
The world we live in today is extraordinary. We live our lives carrying computers with us that provide constant connection to all the people we’ve met in our lives, the bulk of modern human culture, and massive swathes of knowledge (and YouTube Poop SFW). This reality must have an undeniable impact on our minds, with some, like myself, more so than others.
I share a lot. I ‘owe’ my career to social media. First I was discovered through Twitter and hired by a Swiss music startup, then I was discovered through Facebook and hired by a Moscow-based startup. I made the conscious decision to be a public person, and to use social media to share opinions, insights, and create connections, at the obvious cost of privacy and obscurity. Over the years, I’ve shaped a sharing mentality.
My mind does not exist in separation of the reality of the Internet.
What I think, see, hear, smell, feel, or do, I can share.
Mass media is absorbing us.
While I was traveling Thailand and Vietnam, my mind kept me ‘connected’. Even when there was no immediate internet connection available, I knew that at some point in the next few hours, I’d be near WiFi and would be able to share. Facebook is the place where I share some of my more personal experiences.
I hope that a break will help me understand
the impact of the socialization of the personal domain.
I want to understand the impact on the web
Facebook is everywhere. Nearly every site I visit, encourages me to share their content on Facebook. We’re confronted with Facebook’s logo hundreds of times per day in this way; it’s probably more familiar to our subconscious mind by now than the logos of Coca-Cola, Nike or McDonalds.
Facebook has become an integral part of the fabric of the web. Many developers often don’t even offer a way to sign up for a service without Facebook Connect. I wonder how much of the web will break for me. I wonder what services I signed up to using Facebook Connect, that I’ll now be locked out of. We’ll see. Nothing important came to mind while I thought it over for a couple of days.
I won’t miss all the brands who are trying to be my friend.
I want to understand the impact on my information consumption
I follow a bunch of interesting people on Facebook, am part of interesting groups, and have a lot of friends whose views and insights I appreciate a lot. I’m now pretty much detached from most of them, and will have to set up a new stream to curate information. The high number of people I follow on Twitter makes it a bit hit or miss, sometimes there’s something interesting, sometimes there’s not (oh god, I turned my Twitter into TV). I suspect this means the return of bookmarking interesting sources of information, instead of following their pages on Facebook, sending some RSS feeds directly to my Pocket, and perhaps being more active in searching for content, rather than passively consuming the streams.
I want to understand the impact on my privacy
I doubt 28 days will be enough to really understand this, but perhaps I’ll feel a sense of calm in people not being able to find out quite as much about me. This is as much about the socialization of the personal experience, as it is about the fact that corporations and governments are holding massive amounts of data about very personal things, and are constantly inspecting them for signs of threats to the status quo. Meanwhile I’ll finish reading John Twelve Hawks’ free ‘pamphlet’ Against Authority, which touches upon these themes too.
A few years ago I got involved with the Dutch Pirate Party to manage their national parliamentary campaign, and there’s nothing quite like hanging out with hackers and security experts to understand the value of and threat to our privacy. If you don’t have such people around you, I recommend you follow some on Twitter, and watch Citizenfour, a documentary about NSA-whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Effects
I’ve already noticed a small effect. Occasionally, almost automatically, I open up Facebook in my browser, only to be confronted with the login window. I recognize that from when I took a 1 month break from reading the news — my fingers would automatically take me to news sites. Deeply rooted habits.
If anything interesting comes up regarding this experiment, I’ll be reporting either via Medium, or on Twitter.
Oh, and someone please share this to my Facebook friends.
Bas Grasmayer is a futurist, serial expat, and former Head of Information Strategy of Dream Industries (DI) and Product Lead of Zvooq (part of DI). He’s best known for his thesis The Answer is the Ecosystem: Marketing Music through Non-Linear Communication and has previously spoken at conferences such as Midem, Amsterdam Dance Event, European Lab and Sochi Winter Music Conference. Find out more & head over to: http://about.me/bas or follow @basgras
