Leaving Facebook

I made the decision to leave Facebook for a week. Cold turkey. Insanity. I’m doing it for a project about Facebook. I wanted to see how difficult different life would be. My Facebook life isn’t completely out of control. I check it every day, a few times throughout the day (some days more than others). Sometimes I comment on things, and sometimes I just lurk around. I mostly use it to keep in touch with my long distance friends and relatives. It’s not as though Facebook is my end all be all. I’m not friends with everyone I graduated from high school with or my cousin’s boyfriend. I recently went through and deleted about 300 people that I hadn’t talked to in awhile and didn’t anticipate talking to in the near future. I de-tagged some pictures, deleted some notes and photo albums and limited my interests to one or two. I also made it hard for anyone to search for me by eliminating myself from the public search option.
So, why leave Facebook for a project in the first place? The class I’m taking, Media Ecology, has emphasized media and social networking technologies. I’ve realized how important Facebook is for so many people (more than 5 million active users) and how much of their daily life is devoted to their account (700 billion minutes per month, approximately 23 billion minutes per day!). So much times is being used to update statuses, upload pictures, add friends, write messages and read through the news feed that I began to wonder what the point was. Why is it so important for us to stay connected to people we barely know or care about? What could we be doing instead of spending time on Facebook? Has Facebook become the only way to stay connected?
My biggest concern about leaving Facebook is missing something important. It seems most of the parties and events I go to are found out about through this social media network. I, of course, get texts from my friends asking if I’m going on the day or night of, but without Facebook, I would have no idea what they were even talking about. I don’t want to miss break ups, hook ups, weddings, baby pictures, big moves, job offers and everything in between from my “friends.” Which again brings me to this idea that if something were really important, shouldn’t I get a phone call? Are my Facebook “friends” really my friends and should I really care about their personal lives? And why do I care about their personal lives?
It seems that the farther I get into thinking about the point of Facebook and life with it, the more questions I have about the reason it exists and why there are so many people who spend so much time caring about a website. This blog is going to detail my week without it, as well as try to address a few of the questions I’ve asked in this first entry. I truly think too much time is spent on Facebook (I’m just as guilty as anyone else) when it could be spent doing other, more productive and engaging things (I’ll get into more detail in a later entry). While I’m not the biggest fan of the website, I think I might have a harder time going without it for a week than I originally thought. So wish me luck!