text • chris rusak

01-23-10

End.

I have deleted my personal Facebook account for a variety of reasons.

It’s an incredible waste of time.
I didn’t really care about 80% of the people who were my ‘friends.’
Privacy and personal information storage and appropriation.

However, I respect that many use it as a ‘tool’ to aggregate feeds from the net and keep tabs on our ever-growing social circles. Makes you wonder whats going to happen to traditional social interaction… will it all be filtered through a piece of technology as time progresses? That makes me sad.

When I was 11 years old, I was obsessed with computers. I wanted as many as I could have. Game consoles, large grey Apple boxes (back when Apple was Apple, and more dependable than a PC,) beepers. I had them all, too. And, I played laser tag at the local mall.

Now, I am 31. It’s all lost its flair. I romanticize smashing my iPhone, watching the screen explode into tiny shards as I kill it and its slow, buggy platform. I find that I set the brightness on every piece of technology I use to the lowest setting possible, and it’s still too bright for me. (Mark my words, there are significant eye maladies coming down the pike because these excessively pre-programmed bright screens cannot be healthy for us.) Why does it feel like I’m staring into the ballast of a 4-tube fluorescent light fixture when I’m using a Mac? I still prefer to throw a CD in my stereo and listen to it over a quality sound system instead of four-cent earplugs. I’m long over the “next Apple release” hype, and I haven’t excitedly played a game console in over a decade. I loathe that I am considered “the tech guy” at my job.

I will maintain a business page on Facebook if anyone cares to add it to their profile… again, out of respect that some people use it as a bona-fide tool to maximize their social interactions/tracking in their daily life. I don’t see myself submitting more than this blog’s feed, though, as content.

I guess I can only say that being one of the first young kids on the internet back in the early nineties (remember paying by the hour for data access? Remember when your internet bill was over $200/mo? Remember 2400 bps?) that I’ve just reached internet burnout. Yes, I read the news, examine my checking account, and pay my bills all through my web browser. But, I still find the world itself entirely more fascinating than alerting the world about itself through the medium of a status update.

I really don’t care that you just farted on Muni, or that you’re hungry. We all fart, we’re all hungry.

Facebook, for me, has elevated and amplified the boring and mundane, the banal and the unnecessary of peoples’ lives. It has revealed too much about too many people I don’t already know, removing much of the mystery of meeting people sur la rue, blindly vis-a-vis. It has made me dislike people long before I ever even had the opportunity to like them. It seems that through social networking tools, the worst in people trumps their best. At least, it rises higher on a news feed.

If you want to know what’s going on, go outside and talk to someone. Even if they are not your ‘friend.’