Why Facebook is rubbish

I am two weeks away from having my Facebook account deleted. I’ve been on the site for over five years, and in that time have grown to briefly think I might be able to use it to ‘score’, seen countless meaningless party photos, and ultimately, begun to loathe its invasive record of much of my life.

The crux of it is this: Unless a real physical meeting is on the cards, rubbish second and third-tier friends can fuck off and take their bogus ‘connections’ with them. We all have them, we know who they are. I have wasted hours over the years glancing across a sea of data from connections I eagerly added in the hope that they would want to reconnect (an early phase of Facebook usage that’s hard to recall). Instead people try to define themselves through witticisms and poses, largely recycled or devoid of wit or grace. Every now and then someone’s dog dies – Well, boo hoo. Who are you again? From behind the safety of my monitor I come to reject the posturing on display, then recognise that I too am subject to the same posturing and self-defining statements.  I also come to reject the real emotion and events with the same ease of disregard. Then I realise the site, a shop window for the world’s egos, is breeding this behaviour.

I remember university, pre-Facebook, where friends weren’t arranged in any way whatsoever and where new faces were embraced on group outings. You might have developed the new faces as friends over time – asked them questions, slowly come to know them, brought them into the forefront of your social life and maybe even spent more time together. You certainly wouldn’t have stuck their photograph in a book and started recording details about them, and if you asked them to produce their own page in your ‘big book of friends’ I don’t imagine you’d ever see them again. Facebook, of course, is the same repellent concept glossed over by its ‘networking’ pretensions.

The fact is, you can and do have people as Facebook friends who you wouldn’t normally be able to consider a friend at all and you almost certainly ignore them. They, in return, add you, scan your profile and dismiss you. Stevie Wonder just called to say he loved you; Facebook is just standing outside in the dark, staring at you through the window and fumbling in its pants.

There is, in the real world, a great sensory rush when genuinely seeing an old friend again. Your brain updates the smells, sights and changes that you notice in a giddy rush of learning. The attitude, the inflections in a voice, a change of heart, demeanour – things you can’t properly appreciate digitally. Facebook recreates human contact about as faithfully as a Glade plug-in recreates a springtime breeze through an Alpine forest.

The site shows you people as they want you to see them, but we all know that that is never how people are in real life. Now you’re cursed with dozens of these lurker ‘friends’, like a digital mass haunting of also-rans. Also-rans who can only be photographed when drunk, who ‘like’ music (who knew!) and who ‘want Jeremy Clarkson for Prime Minister’. People who think you need to know where they are, night or day, and what happened on the telly just now. People who think their make-up and soft focus webcam photos can make people forget just  how reptilian they look in real life, or that they’ve got a funny nose. People who can’t spell, which would not normally grate as much as it does on a Facebook status update where they are brutally grammatically word-raped by ‘Grammar Nazis’ – people who have picked up a few common corrections but failed to develop any form of restraint for their superiority complex. They too, are a product of the Facebook system; Nobody could spell on MySpace and nobody cared.

Even good friends can use Facebook as a platform to proclaim the inane. Sometimes you can have too much information. Friendship needs mystique. You should make the effort to explore someone else’s record collection rather than giving their Youtube and Spotify links a little blue thumbs-up. Think, too, how Facebook may be turning you into someone else’s rubbish second and third-tier online ghost friend. I dare say I am just such an also-ran to many dozens of people – so why did they add me? The opposite of love, as the saying goes, is indifference. Facebook has a great deal of one and not a lot of the other.

Every interaction on this vast online phone directory for the lonely involves you operating a computer alone, reporting on your own life or reading other people’s reports. When one relationship ended my status showed a broken heart icon, but I would keep visiting my ex’s profile intermittently. The broken heart was apt, but I was unable to digitally let go, and would keep visiting the profile weekly. New photographs would make my heart sink further through the floor until my logical brain gripped the controls and deleted her, freeing me from an entirely optional but compulsive digital love prison. I was Gollum stalking ‘my precious’ on line; Not healthy and not something I’d ever imagined myself doing. Thank you, Facebook.

The model of usage most people adopt is the “idly pissing about seeing what’s new” model, but you shouldn’t suck up the “Top News” on the site any more than you should watch any one TV station 24 hours a day. All Facebook time could be spent doing something productive or genuinely social and literally none of it is.

So with the end in sight, has it made me any richer financially or socially? No. Have I met anyone through Facebook? No.  Facebook is a marketing platform acting as a front for a data farm. It is a place where I offer up my details in return for a sense of ‘connection’, which is something the site genuinely can’t deliver.

For the last few years my Facebook account has held data saying I was born over 100 years ago in Facatativa, Colombia. Now I believe it is no longer enough to just feed the site bogus information. I want out. The weather outside may be crap, but at least it’s real.

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