Following the conversation on @tbeckett's #facebook announcement that he's deleting his account has been kinda fascinating.
There's almost an assumption of social death and feelings of abandonment, which demonstrates how deeply the mediated commodification of our relationships have gotten.
I plan of winding down my account and replacing it with a sockpuppet for unavoidable things following my big work conference in June, and am curious to see how it plays out for me...
As someone with no FB account, the assumptions of social death often leave me a bit bemused.
I made an early fairly private choice that I didn't like the nature of FB. It wasn't a particularly technical or privacy related choice, but a kind of hunch-y ethical one. Something about the way MZ talked about it alerted me to something.
Absolutely nothing bad has happened to me as a result. I'm socially connected and totally OK.
@katebowles The social death aspect surprised me. But FB is a way to retain a social/emotional connection with a lot of people I’d never see otherwise. The benefit of social media is that it brings like-minded people together. But it is also engineered to foster that dopamine hit of connection. For me it became a choice to “be here now” and step aside from all that. @mattcropp