It's Digital Detox Week, a great idea for people like myself whose worst nightmare has become the death, destruction or disappearance of my laptop. i'm not joking about this; just last week i dreamt that i got hit by a van (highly realistic Baku scenario) and instinctively used my computer case to buffer the impact. Laying on the ground in pain, all i could think about was that my computer was wreaked, which felt more devastating than any damage which might have befallen my own, corporeal being. i've no doubt that i'm one of millions in the world today who have developed a serious, insidious fear of losing net access, webcams, or worst of all, having their facebook accounts deleted. Not absolutely sure, but i'm guessing this is a contemporary manifestation of barophobia.
Complete detox from the digital world is definitely not in the cards during a regular work week. On top of having to use a computer to do what i'm paid to do, i've got an international job search going on, this blog, an unrelenting backlog of personal correspondence... what i can do, and have decided to do, is stay off facebook for a week, starting today. Oh, but wait! Shouldn't i post the link to this blogpost first? If i don't explain to everyone what i'm doing, does what i'm doing even matter? How can i network about not networking if i cease to use my networks? This conundrum has endless loops, but i won't falter. No facebook for a full 7 days will be good for me, a sort of digital world ramadan, testing my self-discipline for some higher spiritual Good.
Apparently unlike the vast majority of users, i do actually know 90% of the people in my facebook world, which means i'm well below the 8 new 'friends' per day par. The remaining 10% are folks i have shared political or artistic interests with, similar to the peripheral acquaintances one has in real social settings: the people you enjoy dancing with at parties but never quite manage to share a meal or go to a movie with. Some of my closest friends are not on facebook but i'm proud to say this has not resulted in them falling under my radar. i don't use facebook to chat for the sake of chatting (actually, i keep myself invisible to specifically avoid this), yet as most of my friends are involved in environmental/political/human rights work, i do use it as a source of recommended news and a place to discuss the events of the day. i like to think that the discussions i engage in are meaningful and relevant, and since my friends are all over the planet, it's great for being exposed to art, humor and various forms of weirdness that pop up around the globe.
There have, however, been downsides to the whole facebook experience. Posting something or making a brief 'status' statement that receives no comments feels akin to saying something to a room full of people and being completely ignored. When i first set up my account, i felt it was rude to not acknowledge everything my friends were posting, but keeping up with that became way too time consuming and since nobody else was doing it... Intellectually, given the medium, i have learned to adjust to this dynamic, but i can't help feeling that on some level it's not very healthy, psychologically. Why would you want to be 'friends' with someone you then repeatedly choose not to interact with? For people who derive social identity on the basic of their facebook activity, this could be damaging in subtle or even non-subtle ways.
Then there's the abbreviated opinions phenomenon, since short comment windows mandate short comments and people seem increasingly disinclined or unable to express themselves in more than 3 lines of text, anyway. Alternately, if you write more than 2 complete sentences or say something the least bit contentious, it's end of discussion (if one can even use the word 'discussion' for what is going on) or worse: you can be dealt that 'fuck you if you're too stupid to not agree with me' blow. i encounter this a lot, especially with friends of friends involved in cross-pollinated comment threads. Facebook has generated a new kind of phrasal speak, characterized by incomplete thoughts = weak thinking and rapid dismissal of alternative views. It would be easy to say that one reason i let this blog sit dormant for so long was because facebook distracted me, but the truth is that too much time on the site eroded my ability to write a full paragraph - to think through something long enough to have a full paragraph's worth of words to say about it. It might be positive - exciting, even - to regularly exchange information and ideas with so many diverse personalities, but when the end result is an intellectual meltdown, i'm not convinced that i wasn't better off just sticking to email.
While writing this, i've been listening to archives of an old friend's weekly music broadcast on Area 24 Radio, which i think is located somewhere in Westchester County, New York. This is someone i haven't seen for probably 20 years, yet thanks to facebook, i now have an outlet for random music requests and get to listen to T rifle through his eclectic music vault for two hours every week. So again, not everything about my Facebook experience has been negative, but taking a break is good, too. i listen to my students talk about how they use the site, see what gets posted on the pages of my Azeri acquaintances and realize that just as in the real world of social interaction, i am definitely on the edge of the social gaussian curve. i need to get off facebook for a week; some of them should consider getting off it for life.
You Need To Get Off Facebook from Świat Social Media on Vimeo.
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