Life without
Facebook
All the original reasons why I always believed that one should
delete his/her FB account can be summed up to the following reasons:
1. Facebook became a
time-suck rather than a value-adding tool.
2.
As far as connecting with
real life friends are concerned, I’m able to do that perfectly fine via other
tools, such as via text messages, phone or email. Facebook served little
purpose in this regard. If anything, it added a lot of “noise” in my
relationships to others. There were too many alerts and notifications, and half
of which didn’t mean much in relationship building.
3.
Facebook was doing a lot
of funky things, like adding a whole list of features which I have zero use for
(Games, Events, Groups, etc.). None of them had relevance to me.
4.
I had no use for the FB
inbox and felt frustrated at the inability to turn it off. I felt like I had an
extra inbox to check, and extra messages to process every day, all of which
could be avoided if they just gave you the option to turn it off. FB wanted
people to have a reason to repeatedly visit it every day.
5.
Due to #3 and #4, my FB
account became a pain to maintain.
Possible
Improvements to my life deciding on not having a Facebook Account
All of the things that I reported in “Life without Facebook” are
still valid.
I realized that FB gave a lot of us an illusion of connectivity,
because we’d be seeing each other’s wall updates and status feeds. But when the
dust settles and everything clears, you get a clear sense on how close you are
with friends, which relationships have been lacking, which friends you’ve been
drifting away from, which relationships require more work, and so on.
But
still Why Facebook is Important
One thing that will be missed after not having a FB page is the
1-1 connection with all of your friends on the Facebook account. The regular
wall conversations with you guys, how I can immediately pose a question asking
for help on my feed and get your insightful replies within half a day, etc.
These were and are the great parts about having a FB account; it was just that
the spam issues were so serious that it outweighed the benefits.
But I love connecting with people. Most importantly. Where
that’s missing, there’s little incentive for me to write any further. When I
lost that personal connection with all my friends with no FB account, I always felt
like I was writing to no one, like a blank void in the universe. While I knew
that thousands of people would be reading my next entry, I had no idea who was
going to be reading, for what, how they were like in real life, etc. The whole
blog began to feel empty. Meaningless, in fact, like I was writing for the sake
for writing.
All of you are people whom I’ll love to know better, put a face
to, and connect as individuals vs. a blob of statistics on my Google Analytics
/ Stat counter accounts. The former is what motivates and inspires me on my
path; the latter means nothing to me at all, other than for measurement and
performance tracking purposes. I don’t blog to get higher numbers on my blog
counters, though it may occur as a result of blogging. I blog to connect with
all of you.
I want to be accessible to all of you reading at the blog. I
want to know who you are and why you’re here. I want to know how you’re
doing, whether you’re well, what you’re thinking, and how you’re feeling. I
want to use scalable methods to remove as many walls between us as possible.
This is why I’ve been thinking of a solution to address
this. And I think I may have found the solution by way of a Facebook
page.
