I wanted to remove facebook, but i can't I will lose connections to friends I met outside my home country. Its kind of the internal person-service that i can't live without currently.
This is an unfortunate truth. It's just so frustrating that the network effect means that moving off of Facebook means loosing a whole bunch of connections that won't go elsewhere.
Understandable, because (anecdotally) it turned out to be the most effective way to get rid of Facebook. Over a couple of weeks I unfollowed all the friends and communities, and ended up with clean page that asked me to add more friends. Since the place turned to barren land with no life, I simply stopped coming there.
Saying that facebook connects people only in ways limited by the imagination if its creators is true. But still, it CONNECTS PEOPLE. By deleting facebook without finding a replacement that is better than facebook, you are losing this new way of connecting people. Stuff like skype works for connecting with a relatively small social circle. Facebook allows a looser but also much larger circle. Presumably a better means of communication will come along sooner or later. The telephone replaced the telegraph, myspace replaced friendster, but until it comes along facebook(twitter?) is still the best means for this new large scale high volume asynchronous communication that we have.
It doesn't. Some of us got off Facebook years ago (or stopped using it). An individual abstaining didn't stop society from being manipulated the way this describes, FB's reach is too great.
Users would need an order of magnitude superior
alternative, and most critically, users would
need to move en mass.
Yeah. Network effect. Arguably nothing on Earth has ever had such a powerful network effect as Facebook.
I dislike FB for all of the usual reasons, plus a few of my own.
But I still have an FB account. I don't check it very often, and I've got notifications turned off. But ditching my FB account entirely means I'd lose access to dozens of people I wouldn't have a great way of contacting otherwise.
History tells us that something eventually will replace it. But, it's hard to imagine.
It was mostly the lack of any usefulness. But one of the other major reasons I deleted my Facebook years ago was that I used to feel disappointed when one of my posts had less comments or likes. I knew it was time to delete that social network.
Children and teenagers could have life altering effects due to constant exposure to such experiences on these sites.
Right on. I quit Facebook about 2 years ago for the exact same reason and never looked back. I think you're on to something here. Network effects work both ways. If each new user on a platform compounds it's utility and desirability, then the reverse is also true. This means even a relatively small, but non-trivial, number of people shunning Facebook can drastically reduce it's desirability and power.
I saw a little tiny glimpse of this when an organization I'm in wanted to use Facebook to schedule events and communicate. There were perhaps 30 of us in the group and myself and one other person spoke up and said we weren't on Facebook, so we would either need to be emailed the events or simply not participate. The head of the org decided it was easier just to send everyone an email. So two stubborn people out of 30 changed the way an organization decided to interact with it's members.
I think the argument is that, should Facebook use become pervasive enough that the bulk of interaction, be it social or financial happens there, you have already disappeared by nature of not using it.
I don't understand why deleting Facebook is difficult. It may be the easiest way to opt out. It's no more difficult than abandoning corporate media. You don't need it. Connect with real people who you care about in the real world.
My issue with deleting Facebook is that a lot of services depend on it for authentication and friend/contact discovery. I wish there were an open standard for a social graph.
Facebook is/was important step in the evolution of our understanding for social interaction and what is import as information and what not. The complete exhaustion of the moving force behind FB is needed for us to transcend into the next hyper-dense digital-society.
There's a saying that 'many things fly, only few are edible', and understanding FB is fundamentally understanding this principle.
I doubt the service will ever completely disappear, but its high time it gets marginalized (at least in developed societies) the same way TV is marginalized as FB is essentially the same programmed stream of bullshit, that you don't normally need in your life.
Understanding what the author understood in his article is a cathartic moment, that besides other things, has something to do with the conscious decision to actually consume what you want and not what you were given. This means focus.
Dropping out of FB and similar means of "social presence" is essentially taking back control over where you are going in terms of information being consumed by oneself.
Of course it will feel liberating to not feed oneself with irrelevant information. It doesn't mean stopping being social, but re-evaluating what socialization effectively means.
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