I'm taking my days back.

"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time."  - Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO

http://www.businessinsider.com/10-reasons-to-delete-your-facebook-account-2010-5 

I'm done with Facebook. It's starting to feel like walking down a street where everyone is walking around their house naked, with a megaphone in their hand and all the windows open.

I don't like what Facebook is doing to the way people interact with each other. In a manner that text messaging barely hinted at, our interpersonal communication is being butchered. We discard sentences for garbled abbreviations and word limits, and wax at length about things that, until recently, we found boring when we did them ourselves. Now we spend significant amounts of our day listening to other people, many of whom we barely know, talk about them.

Mostly, I don't like what it's done to the way I communicate. I've fallen for it. Instead of getting out and doing things, I'm spending far too much of my life trolling Facebook to see who's said what, who's commented on their comments, who's commented on my comments about their comments...and much of it is worth neither saying nor hearing.  In what seems like only months, we have fallen far too easily into a pattern of the electronic equivalent of talking for the joy of hearing the sound of our own voice...remember when that used to be a bad thing? When we would put at least some thought into making what we said interesting, witty, intelligent...now, in a practice that completely overshadows the fast, exciting sport of train spotting, we have people on pages like The Onion who simply want to be the first person to type 'First' in the comments...that has to be one of the saddest fads I've ever seen.

I'm done with vaguebooking attention seekers. " X doesn't think she can take it any longer", "Y is NOT happy", "there's no turning back now..."....and then their friends, often the same old handful, swallow the bait and confirm that self-pity and vague hinting at your emotional distress  is still a valid strategy for getting your ego stroked...what is this, 9th Grade again? This is from people in their forties and fifties, for crying out loud....just because I'm continually trying to learn new ways to use technology to improve my quality of life, doesn't mean I have to revert to the emotional maturity of the target age group. I love technology, it allows me to do things I never dreamed of. It also provides the perfect megaphone for drama queens. I learned this lesson two years ago when I resigned from a couple of email discussion groups. Time to learn it again.

I'm going to start putting my life back the way it was before we all started washing our underwear at the same trough. I'm leaving the page up while I consider the alternatives. I won't be spending time on Facebook anymore. Enough's enough, and I have other things to do, and better ways to stay in touch.  I'm sick of the digital diarrhea, this white noise of so much boring detail of other people's lives...I may love you like a Tasmanian sister, but I really don't care that much that you're tired and it's time for bed, I really don't care what you had for breakfast - at least, I never used to....can you imagine, 5 years ago, hitting speed dial on your phone to fifty or a hundred friends to let them know you're off to bed?  And the reason I've been guilty of the same thing is because, like the proverbial boiling frog, I've come to accept the banal, creeping dullness of this minutae, this reduction of life to detail that would embarrass the Seinfeld scriptwriters...I'm no longer sure I believe that this continual living out loud is taking us anywhere good...'slide nights' used to be considered by many the ultimate symbol of suburban mind-numbing boredom - now we do it for recreation...in a darkened room by ourselves, watching other people's slides...

This isn't normal. We didn't used to do this. This isn't how grownups behave. Looking through other people's stuff when they're not home, poking in drawers and cupboards because we can, because they forgot to reset the 'Everyone' default on every single one of their Facebook photo albums individually, and leaving post-its all over the place saying "I was here"...if you can remember someone's name, anyone, doesn't matter how long ago you knew them, if you have enough time, you'll find their page if they have one...where they live, who they're friends with, anything they've taken pictures of, what colour socks they wear on Thursdays...we used to read novels and watch films about the great lengths that spies and private detectives had to go to when they went snooping for this sort of stuff, we used to value our privacy. 

Minding your own business used to be the norm. Now it's a dying art.