More and more lately I find myself clicking on headlines that read “I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days…” or “I Quit Liking Things On Facebook for Two Weeks.” looking for some validation for the pre-breakup feelings I’m having about the social media giant. I’ve performed my own little experiments to see if I can affect the algorithm, and in turn, the updates I see, but that only made the disenchantment worse.
You see, for me, Facebook has turned into that awkward table at a party where the socially unaware people end up. All of them shuffling their feet and nervously laughing when they have nothing to say. They know that there are more interesting places to be, but have no idea how to make the transition. They know that there’s more to life than re-hashing the same puns and swapping favorite video game stories and tips for better late-night snacks, but still… they’re comfortable there. They’re safe. So am I.
My friends all still actively use FB despite the increasing rate at which they complain about it. They rely on FB to keep them up to date on even the biggest news in each others lives, although we all notice more and more that even our closely intertwined, tagged and checked in statuses are missing from our own timelines. It’s the one platform we ALL communicate on, even though we individually participate in everything else from Vine and IG to Voxer, G+, Twitter and the good old fashioned landline. FB still trumps them all as the one universal means of communication. Besides, I still have to log on to manage the pages built for our entertainment websites, even as Facebook does everything it can to diminish our hard-earned reach in that department as well. That’s why I haven’t had a big dramatic breakup with old Zuckerberg. Instead I just stopped contributing to it on a personal level. I’ll pop a smoke signal on there occasionally, but for the most part I’ve been a lot better off leaving the big blue button untouched. No science or statistics on that one. Just me, feeling better about reaching out to my friends MY way, even if it’s in-game chat over a Yahtzee app. At least I know an algorithm isn’t hiding my update because it’s no longer a broadcast message. It’s direct to the person I want to give it to.