Please Don’t Take Offense if I Don’t Facebook Friend You or if You Were Unfriended

I’m speaking about my personal Facebook, not the blog’s. I’m slowly but surely scaling back my personal social media presence. I think Facebook and other social media like Twitter are ruining the country and harshening discourse. Back when I decided Comcast and Cable News were destroying the country, I cut the cord. That cord cutting wasn’t any cold turkey approach: it came about because I realized I was paying a crappy company like Comcast more than 100 bucks a month for TV that wasn’t worth watching.

Now I’m starting to feel the same way about Social Media. The blog will continue to use social media as its own entity, but I myself am scaling back to friends and family; basically people I know or have known in meatspace. I mostly use Facebook now to share old pictures that my family likes, so you’re really not missing much. At some point I’ll run out of old pictures, and then perhaps Facebook will go the way of Comcast. So please don’t be put off if I don’t friend you. Eventually I want to be free of Facebook and the like.

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21 thoughts on “Please Don’t Take Offense if I Don’t Facebook Friend You or if You Were Unfriended”

  1. That works for me. I have been slowly cutting back on Facebook too. I may even start cutting some of my extended family.

    1. Been there, done that.

      I blocked one of my cousins a few months ago when I got sick of dealing with his constant desire to aggressively attempt to spread his own brand of willful ignorance.

      I can deal with disagreement, but what pushed me over the edge was that he had a long history of responding to my carefully reasoned and researched posts in five minutes while completely ignoring at least half of what I’d written. Since he clearly wasn’t interested in hearing alternative points of view, I decided that I’d be better off without his.

  2. Ive been that way from the start. No cable T.V. No facebook friends unless i know them in real life. i use Twitter though

  3. Congratulations! I hope to work around to emulating you in cutting the cable, sometime in the future.

    I had a Facebook account for about a year then took it down. I never did “get it.” Plus, I was initially friended by distant relatives overseas, mostly young girls who seemed to adhere to a fad for using provocative poses for their Facebook profile. Then, friends of theirs friended me with similar pictures. Not that I didn’t like the pictures, but if anyone had looked at my Facebook friends they would have taken me for a lech trolling for young European girls.

    Now I do absolutely no social media at all.

    1. I think Facebook itself generates the friend requests based on connections. The more connections, the more revenue.

  4. Does it make more sense to quit Facebook and run one of those open source personal clouds since you’re only doing low bandwidth things with photos?

    I never had Facebook, Twitter or even MySpace. I never investigated ownCloud but read good things about it.

  5. I wish I had the option to cut off comcast, only cable provider around here and with 5 computers and a slew of game systems feeding off the internet we need cable modem speed.
    We don’t even have DSL as an option…..

    FB is my main news source anymore, the main(shit)stream media is a joke and distorts everything to fit their agenda.

    So I stay on FB and rant about politics……

  6. I never posted photos of me or my family I think it is just wrong to post about my personal doings to the world or people I do not know. The internet and facebook are public so I made that a practice early. I do post the shared page that I did for my high school reunion. Still no personal photos. I am not so vain to think people are interested in my day to day activities. Though once posted some snow photos this year.

  7. “meatspace” ?? LOL. I did not even know we needed a special name for it.

    I thought the internet and Facebook was mostly for posting “is this legal” “Do I need a lawyer” and “is this banned in Maryland” posts. You know, stuff you totally want to yell in front of everyone.

    2. Meatspace dates at least to several of the cyberpunk RPGs of the late eighties, and probably to Gibson himself.

  8. Been teevee free for over a year now. Same reason. Never did twittface or others.

  9. I ditched Facebook once I realized that it was damaging more relationships than it was fostering. I decided I’d much rather be ignorant of what acquaintances and friends of friends thought about conservatives and gun owners than risk being at some kids birthday party with them while knowing they’d love to see me in an internment camp

    1. “I decided I’d much rather be ignorant of [the fact that] acquaintances and friends of friends thought…conservatives and gun owners…[belong] in…internment camp[s]…”

      Frankly, I take the opposite view: I’d rather know which people in my “network” hold such dangerous and anti-social views. Such people should be assumed to be insane, and should not be placed in positions of trust and/or where they can spread their cancerous ideas to our children.

  11. I stopped using Facebook too, a decision which was reinforced by the reports of Facebook suppressing conservative news stories and manipulating trending feeds.

    The one remaining positive about Facebook was the local gun sale/swap groups; they connected people who would meet at a dealer and do the paperwork. Facebook shut them all down a couple months back. With that I moved from not participating on the site to actively taking down things I had posted. No reason to support such an organization.

    Got rid of TV in 2010; after a couple months, it’s remarkable how much clearer you can think.

  12. Did you switch to a different cable-based isp? Or are you pure cellular?

    We still have Comcast as an ISP, but don’t bother with old-atyle ‘cable TV’. I would ditch Comcast in a heartbeat, but they are a monopoly in my town.

  13. I use FB to keep up with people who are not within physical social reach; life happens, people move away, or I connect with people I’ve met perhaps once or twice in meatspace.

    But I have a fairly strict rule about friending people I haven’t met in person – I don’t do it (there are a handful of exceptions, mostly people I want to meet in person but haven’t had the opportunity to do so yet.

  14. My feelings won’t be hurt if/when you unfriend me. As I tell people who I’ve unfriended … It’s facebook, it’s not real life.

    I’m a big fan of FB and social media in general, the problem is it’s unfiltered (unless you choose to filter it with groups, which few of us do). i.e. my crazy liberal Aunt who hates anything to do with guns … I would normally not talk to her about guns or politics because family comes first and I’m not going to change her mind anyway. On FB I finally removed her from my news feed so I wouldn’t have to see her ignorant and just plain hateful stuff and she ignores me as well. She’s still my aunt and still family but FB takes away the filtering that we would have in meat space.

    1. I’ll block or “turn down” sources of posts, which has a side effect of lowering the chances of the poster showing up on my own FB feed. And I’ve basically trained my eyeballs to slide over certain topics; just as I would let stuff go at the Thanksgiving table. At least on FB it’s not considered rude to not participate in a discussion.

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