Axing Social Media

Facebook came to me with great interest.  I was visiting my son, who had accepted a post-college research position, really a stop-gap activity until he could pursue a more permanent career, at NYU.  It had been a while since I abandoned going to the 7-Eleven for the NY Times.  Too high a fee and too little newsprint in the Outer Provinces.  But in NYC, what a deal!  And while reading it I understood why I had targeted obtaining a copy as a Sunday morning institution for so many years.  That morning's edition contained an article on the emergence of Facebook as a means of reconnecting with old friends.  At forty years post high school and with a reunion scheduled near my hometown just a few months hence, I never lost my interest in the people I once knew.  When I returned home, I enrolled in FB on my PC, reacquainted with more people than I could expect to see in the flesh that coming fall, catching up on forty years of old times.  People not very close to me in the 1960s evolved into people of accomplishment in the first decade of this century.  They had careers.  They had families.  They had pets.  They had religious and political stances, some predictable, many unexpected.  We bantered about old times.  As our children entered their marriages and careers, we shared that.  And geography.  As the scheduled reunion arrived, I now had FB as an entry to conversation and catch up. 

Back home. More nominal friends, a few finding me.  It was social media.  And then organizations of the welcome type found their way to my screen.  Medical sites.  Sports teams.  Subsets of my alma maters.  I had begun a new job shortly after, so lots of stories to tell and stories to hear.  No trolls for another election cycle.  

The unwelcome really nudged its way in rather insidiously about four years into my enrollment.  My new-found HS acquaintances had used up their pleasantries.  Too many became sloganeers who would share whatever unflattering photo or distorted comment of officials or even people they opposed.  People who I knew as congenial in person felt no need to be with their fingers on a keyboard.  As mid-decade with its toxic electoral cycle using FB as a forum, those common pleasantries of favorite football teams, sharing once in a lifetime travels, displaying culinary talent, all became subordinate to pitching your candidate or cause, which is probably OK until it becomes excessive or makes a turn from promoting your preference to vilifying the other.  

Limping along from there, some seven years have plodded on.  The corporate mission has changed from giving me a chance to connect with people of intersecting interest to disconnecting me from a portion of my money.  The people whose posts about career, family, travel, and kitchen rarely kept me in the loop of their activities or thoughts.  In its place came people I hardly knew from my youthful past, people who had little better to do than sit at their screens and type, unrestrained by either a clock or a desire to go outside to sample the rest of the world.  While I still have nominally about 100 Friends, I really only receive posts from about half a dozen, and not the same half a dozen I would have put on my priority connect list.  I made a commitment to never unfriend a HS classmate, and I haven't, but unfollowed a few.  I'm even pretty tolerant of those who sought me out, though those people do get Unfriended once they attack me or get too focused on frumkeit which I don't share.  

There still being a vestige of scientist in me, I did a series of counts on where unsolicited posts originated.  I looked at twenty consecutive posts, starting at a random point, counting how many came from people on my Friends List.  About half, replicated many times.  And how many of those were their own comments rather than Shares of some type?  Hopelessly few.

Time to depart.  I have been a FB Anti-Nazir in the past, with various schema.  I would stay away for a week.  Invariably my email would alert me to messages I had to read.  The company hires psych majors from the best schools who know how to keep customers looking at their screens and no others.  Mostly I resisted the bait, checking messages so not to overlook people's birthdays, even though my own greetings to them is pretty much templated.  I look at these interludes much as a do a vacation, time away with the intent of returning with a different perspective.  That never happens.  I've spun a virtual roulette wheel.  Odd numbers, I sign on to FB that day, even numbers including 0/00 I don't.  It works well, signing on a little less than half the days.  Downside, regretting the days I signed on that siphon me from other things I should be doing instead, with no real satisfaction of being there.

It's really time to exit.  I'm about a week into it, checked messages twice when alerted, regretted doing even that.  Deleted FB App from my phone.  Now, I have exited certain social media permanently in the past.  Twitter has been gone about a year.  Sermo, the physicians site, I abandoned shortly after retiring, more prompted by a change in their corporate format than any desire not to be among fellow physicians of diverse world and professional views.  The company just ruined the site.  Same with classmates.com where I reconnected with a fair number of old acquaintances.  Worth free with advertising subsidy, not worth monthly fee.  FB fulfilled this niche better and with no fee.  I don't miss any of them.  Probably wouldn't even remember my sign-in passwords for any of them.  

I wonder if these social media have life cycles like people, organizations, or businesses do.  There is a nascent idea, a period of growth, one of stability, one of decline.  Places I used to like to shop are no more. The congregation of my bar mitzvah completed its life cycle.  My current congregation is at the end of its life cycle.  We can debate about America.  What implodes the business and organizations is the loss of their attractiveness to people.  Those Reverse Roach Motels where they only check out.  

Looking at what FB Friends posts I receive, I cannot really tell if the people whose minds I value most opted out and just aren't posting anymore to anyone, or whether they are still active, but the corporate algorithms separate me from them.  But either way, that interactiveness that I learned about from the NY Times had its years of pleasurable reality.  It's not there anymore.  I don't find interactive at my synagogue either.  No response or separated from the responses that exist makes its own statement.  I made a proposal to myself to avoid FB this month.  Anti-Nazirs are usually time-bound in their vows.  But for now I'm seeing FB as a resource headed in the direction of Twitter and Sermo.