Social networking Darwinism: Survival of the quitter

Last week I left Facebook and, like an ex who can’t let go, she has kept all my stuff.

“For when you come back,” Facebook said, weeping.

But it’s been ten days and I’ve already got so much more work done. Not only that, but the compulsion to check in has gone away – the urge to see if she has anyone new. This is how I know that Facebook isn’t Real.

Had Morgan Freeman been my Facebook Friend, he might have said, “Well, they weren’t your real friends, anyway.”

Notwithstanding the creepy and poorly-justified factoid that Facebook-quitting recidivism is high, the Palo Alto-based company is almost Scientologist in its refusal to let go.

Having been a member of primordial social networking site Friendster (99 friends) and, later, MySpace (20,000 strangers, robots, and people I’d have nothing to say to if bent backwards over in Twister), I knew what I wanted and didn’t want out of my Web 2.0 experience when I joined Facebook.

I wanted an elegant, uniform interface. I wanted greater levels of privacy and stalker-blocking. I wanted to share essential contact information as a gateway to deeper offline business and personal relationships. Lacking these, other social networking sites were either non-starters or quickly wore out their novelty; not difficult considering MySpace’s interface looked like a GIF hemorrhage.

Facebook, at first, offered the clear alternative.

From its lowbrow beginnings as a Hot Or Not? tribute using purloined Harvard student IDs, Facebook launched in 2004 and currently has 300 million members internationally. It’s likely that this paragraph isn’t necessary, as you are probably a member.

Regardless, Facebook quickly evolved into an application that appealed to sober-minded Internet users interested in initiating and maintaining contact with friends and colleagues as well as to college students and texting teens as an adjunct to their MySpace accounts.

But I think Facebook’s success as the perfection of social networking has revealed that SN is ultimately flawed, in the same way that early compact disc versions of vinyl albums proved the limitations of the source material. Facebook is too big to be useful; the virtual intimacy of reading what someone had for breakfast, and multiplying that by every participating member of one’s friend list, adds up to neither Intimacy nor Interesting.

Or it may be that I – and, by extension, all humans – have reached an addiction threshold where I am aware that each time I visit Facebook, there is less to gain from it.

Two weeks into my Facebook membership a night came where I realized I had spent two hours surfing when I should have been working. After that I determined to only spend five minutes a day on Facebook. This worked for a while.

And I added other rules. I would not admit anyone as a friend who didn’t write a personal note accompanying his “add.” I designed status updates to promote discussion. I routinely went on purges of friends I hadn’t heard from after we’d added each other. Do I really know Alec Decaneas?

Because it had quickly become clear that, despite the hype about social networking (I attended at least seven conferences about it), it added little beyond the cool factor to stimulate business; I paid more attention to personal e-mails than I did to Facebook invitations, I chafed at having Facebook host my posted links, and, like most other adults, I noted with disdain the proliferation of third party applications and the type of people who used them.

I should mention that the five-minute rule was for work hours. At home, if I couldn’t sleep, I would spend most of that time updating Facebook. In my tenth month of membership I instituted Facebook Free Days, wherein 24 hours of other peoples’ horoscopes, coffee-drinking habits, Mafia Wars, and wall posts would go by unheeded.

Leaving Facebook was ultimately a decision that mixed lack of business with lack of pleasure. The nature of friendship consists in tangible contact. And this is not “evolving.” There is no way for a human to utilize a social networking application that will sustain more than a certain exponent of his actual physical social circle. After that a social networking application becomes broadcasting, a one-way form of communication.

I had 470 Facebook “friends.” There were a few trophies in there (Amy Fisher told me when she got pregnant!) but there were six times as many people who added me because I was on the Friends list of someone else, wrote no note, and who I ignored. In the rare case in which I questioned the add, I got no response most of the time. One New York actor I’d apparently gone to school with was indignant. “Well Facebook recommended you,” she said.

When I decided to leave, I wrote a week of status updates asking for the e-mail, phone number, web, and snail addresses of my Facebook friends (because Facebook offers no export option). I received 80 replies.

Were these 80 people my true friends? Not necessarily, but they’re definitely on my Christmas card list now, and if I ever get a spare room they’re welcome there. But, aside from 30 or so people who didn’t submit their data because of extenuating circumstances (lived next to me, shared a babysitter, had a crappy computer, never kept in contact anyway, just had a baby), I’m fairly certain that a majority portion of anyone’s Facebook friends wouldn’t show up on moving day.

Facebook pleaded for a while. It asked what made me leave, provided checkboxes, and offered solutions. It suggested that perhaps the failure of the relationship was my fault – that Facebook couldn’t be all things to all people, and that I should modify my unrealistic expectations. It showed me pictures of people who would be sad that I left. I knew that some of them couldn’t care less.

So I will return to personal and business websites and the various evolutions of traditional media. I will wait for what Web 3.0 offers. I have a feeling Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter will shut down, as will their inevitable successors, in a few years. The experiment will fail, unless social networking is rebranded as These People Aren’t Really Your Friends.

I got two adds the week I began saying goodbye. One was from a woman I’d met as a National Park Ranger, who is now a professor in the American Southwest. “Yeah,” she said, “my students are making fun of me, so I thought I’d join.” The other was from someone I’d known since Mrs. Emerson’s kindergarten class. I told him I was leaving Facebook, but I thanked him for writing a note.

“Mrs. Emerson always told us that letters were polite,” he said.

Is Mrs. Emerson on Facebook?

No. She’s dead.

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