Over the past few years, Facebook has gone from being just another social network to being so ubiquitous that it has become a verb, like ‘to text’ or ‘to email’. Some are betting that ‘to Facebook’ will replace both. The reasons for its success are manifold: it is simple, usable, fast, and, crucially, made permission-based photo sharing easy to set up. Unlike MySpace, Friendster, Flickr, and Bebo, this allowed Facebook broke the age barrier. It is photos that tease the social anxieties of teenagers, tickle our voyeuristic, vicarious tendencies, and ensnare parents and grandparents with the promise of seeing their children and grandchildren at play.

We are living in an age of accelerating addictiveness and Facebook the crack cocaine of websites. It is compulsive: rewarding short, frequent visits with ‘likes’, pokes, comments, event invites, phototagging, and chat. Some have reported pangs of withdrawal as the fear of missing out on something takes hold. You become conscious of an addiction when it starts having negative consequences; people drink a lot of tea, but view see themselves as being addicted. What are the negative effects of Facebook? For me, it was the consciousness that the content was so banal that I felt myself become cretinized. There is only so many times you can see a ‘funny’ video or a witty bon mot about some ephemeral news story before you want to poke your own eyes out. I like my friends, but found their Facebook output depressingly low on substance.

For people like me, regular internet users since the mid-Nineties, Facebook represents a refutation of the idea that you can be something more than your meatspace identity. All those avatars and nom de plume were replaced, in Facebook-world, with the stolidity of your first and last name. Arguably this is the great advance of Facebook over other social networks. The dream of Zuckerberg and his cohorts is that by having everything you do attributable to one identity, people will be more responsible in what they say rather than hiding behind the mask of anonymity. This is very useful for advertisers and potentially useful for human beings. Anyone who has ever been abused by a pseudonymous forum member or commenter will know that this is a good thing. But what happens when that so-called identity becomes a vivid part of yourself. What happens when its tendrils wrap themselves around your conception of who you are with all your likes and dislikes. What happens when this self-conception starts to limit possibilities? If a person falls in a forest and there is no one to say “Lol” do they really fall at all? The more you write about yourself, the more imprisoned within your ego you become. A personality is nothing more than a collection of reactions by other people. Is the person who is reacted against more real than the person who is ignored?

On day two of my experiment, I was hit by a feeling of dread. It was as if I had no identity, I was a free-floating collection of atoms with nothing to confirm who and why and what I was. And yet, by limiting the amount of information I consumed, my thoughts were clearer and I am generally more relaxed. It makes you wonder how much mental energy goes on keeping up with the social whirl.The longer I remain deactivated, the more incredulous I was that I visited Facebook at all. When you give something up there is a point after which it is so insignificant that you you wonder why you gave it up in the first place. The anxiety of missing out on events and the validation from having something click “Like” on your post, didn’t matter a jot.

If the noise of Facebook is the bottomless banality of Farmville, music videos, and checking in, what is the signal? What is the good stuff? It seems to me that the good stuff is the sense of human connection, it is a one-to-many communication device that doesn’t feel completely impersonal. Alas, on Facebook few appeals to the many are felt as personal: it is spam, boasting, teasing, provoking, or just banal. And, it seems to me, that because Facebook is used when we want to procrastinate, it is banality that is rewarded with comments and ‘likes’, further discouraging thought or beauty.

Facebook updates (photos, notes, links, videos) are like crisps, you can keep eating them as long as they are there. If, in the middle of a packet of crisps, you found a steak you would throw it away, it is inappropriate.
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My first full day after having given up Facebook proved one thing – and that is that the human mind is capable of finding distraction everywhere. Distraction is the thing that takes you away from the moment. When you are in the moment, there is nothing like it. Distraction is the thing that takes you out of the moment, preventing you from embracing it, telling you to look elsewhere for enlightenment.

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Facebook is like capitalism in the sense that it can consume everything you throw at it (Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, Livejournal updates), but cannot be consumed (due to the walled garden). It is the end of the internet. Douglas Ruskoff, an early internet pioneer and prophet, is misguided when he says that Facebook will fade as the cool kids leave, just as other social networks faded in the past. Unlike the other social networks, this one has gone way beyond cool kids into the office and the retirement home.

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Without Facebook, life is quiet; you can concentrate on things without the tyrannical need to check for reactions, events, happenings. I no longer felt alienated from the modern world and its celebration of tittle tattle. I found that I was more willing to engage in one-to-one conversations, which are far more rewarding than one-to-many. One-to-many feels like spam to me, however cutesy the wording is.

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Trouble is, if you’re going to stop Facebooking there are a lot of other silly online things that you need to stop doing at the same time. Reading newspapers (and especially newspaper comments), watching YouTube videos, going on Twitter, or checking email.

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Completely removing yourself from Facebook is an extremist, scorched earth policy, which implies that you are incapable of moderation. The people I admire most on Facebook are those who are on Facebook but don’t use Facebook. They understand that it is a fact of modern life — like television and the mobile phone — but don’t need to check it compulsively or at all. And so, for the last few days of the experiment, I reactivated my account in order to see if I was capable of this kind of self-discipline.

At its best, Facebook is just a set of tools: an events manager, email without spam, a nice way of keeping in touch with friends and family, a means to connect to websites without being forced to fill in yet another registration form. Ignore the relentless banality of the status update, resist the urge to observe the drama of everyday life, and it might even be useful.

I made my excuses to my nod pal and went to see the decadent sex comedy, Horrible Bosses. It was horrible and reminded me that I make a lot more mistakes than forgetting the big G.

This post assumes that you have a self-installed WordPress blog and know how to install and navigate to plugins. If you don’t, check out the Codex.

It uses a WordPress plugin called Redirection, which allows you to create quick 301 redirects like so:

For The Spirit of the Staircase I created a fake download mp3 link which redirected to my real mp3 link. You can use this fake link and the podcast will download as normal, but with the advantage of getting statistics.

It seems obvious in retrospect, but hopefully this might help out one or two people who have the same problem. Whether it is healthy to be overly concerned with stats is another matter.