Facebook Exodus by Virginia Heffernan in NY Times.
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.
“The more dependent we allow ourselves to become to something like Facebook — and Facebook does everything in its power to make you more dependent — the more Facebook can and does abuse us,” Harmsen explained by indignant e-mail. “It is not ‘your’ Facebook profile. It is Facebook’s profile about you.”
I've been thinking of quitting Facebook (or FB, as my friends call it) for weeks now. I'm having thoughts about its functionality and what I can get from it. I'm pretty sure I'm a little paranoid over the thought of sharing photos of me, my family, and my friends. Their mine and for personal consumption alone. I don't have that much photos in my profile, I'm happy to say; though the ones posted there were those which I use as my main profile pictures and those uploaded by friends and which I was tagged.
I also don't use the applications because they annoy me. Speaking of annoyance, what's the deal with those quizzes anyway? Can I say: too much info? I have to admit, though, that I'm curious with the games played by friends over at FB. I don't want to get hooked on it so I never once tried one. Call me a purist, but I like playing games on my portable gaming console.
More so, looking at status messages make me feel like a stalker. Reading those status messages also gives me the urge to censor what I say especially now that employers use that site to check out applicants. Privacy, people, privacy. *cringe*
The only thing I probably use most of the time in Facebook is its chat feature so I can talk to friends who migrated from Friendster (the then ruling social networking site in the Philippines) because they're too lazy to log in to their IM clients.
Writing this made me reach a dreadful conclusion. I'm still at lost whether to delete my account on that online "social" *snicker* networking site or not.
