If you have not seen this already, its’ worth a read :
\nBy Steve Tuttle | Newsweek
\nI was a late convert to Facebook, the social-networking site that
\nturned five years old Wednesday. I joined about a year ago at age 47,
\nswept up in the massive wave of people turning the corner to the back
\nnine of life, and pitifully trying to do what comes so naturally to
\nour sons and daughters. My own 16-year-old, Grace, literally cried
\nfrom embarrassment when I told her I was signing up, and she begged me
\nthrough her tears not to do it. When it was clear that I was serious,
\nshe made me promise never to “friend” her. Since I didn’t know what
\nthat meant at the time, I agreed. Last week I redeemed myself in her
\neyes, because I signed off of Facebook forever?or at least until
\nTuesday.
\nI had one of those Hallmark movie moments. I was sitting here at work
\nthinking up my next pithy “status update,” which is where you
\nbroadcast to all your online buddies in a few words what you’re up to
\nat that very moment?and finally came to my senses. “What the hell have
\nI become?” I cried.
\nSo goodbye 157 Facebook friends, 75 of whom I wouldn’t recognize if I
\nsaw you on the street……<\/p>\n
\n..Goodbye super nifty “Pieces of Flair”
\napplication, and the 1,332,359 members of the “I Don’t Care How
\nComfortable Crocs Are, You Look Like a Dumbass” Crocs-hater group.
\nGoodbye, William and Mary alums I barely remember from 25 years ago.
\nNot you, Tom, the other Tom. Hello to actually working at my job
\nagain. Well, a little anyway. I wouldn’t have been able to write this
\nstory about quitting Facebook if I didn’t quit Facebook because I
\nwouldn’t have had the time.
\nWhen I think about all the hours I wasted this past year on Facebook,
\nand imagine the good I could have done instead, it depresses me.
\nInstead of scouring my friends’ friends’ photos for other possible
\nfriends, I could have been raising money for Darfur relief, helping
\nout at the local animal shelter or delivering food to the homeless. It
\ndepresses me even more to know that I would never have done any of
\nthose things, even with all those extra hours.
\nI was so addicted to my imaginary playgroup, I put the Facebook
\napplication on my BlackBerry. That way I could know immediately when
\nsome kid who used to pick on me in elementary school was reaching out
\nacross the years to remind me that I still had cooties. Once I was so
\nentranced reading my Facebook page on my handheld, that I lost sight
\nof the actual faces of the people on the street around me, and came to
\nonly after I fell into the lap of a man in a wheelchair. I was hurt
\nwhen he rebuffed my attempt to friend him, but it turns out real life
\ndoesn’t have that feature.
\nNothing personal, former Facebook friends: I’ll miss those wall
\nupdates about doing dishes and changing the kitty litter. I’ll miss
\nseeing those artsy photos of beach sunsets and city streets covered
\nwith snow. I’ll miss posting those, I mean. I’ll miss your constant
\nname dropping and updates that make sure we all know you’re camping in
\na hemp tent on a sustainable emu farm in Costa Rica, or that you eat
\nonly dolphin-free tuna, and I should too. But most of all, I will miss
\nthose hundreds upon hundreds of baby pictures that remind me daily of
\nhow insanely happy I am that my kids aren’t babies any more.
\nThen there’s the whole anxiety-inducing to-friend-or-not-to-friend
\nminefield that I won’t miss at all. You get a request from, say,
\nSpiffy McGee, but the name doesn’t ring a bell. You see that you share
\na friend, so maybe he found you that way. Or you note that he went to
\nyour college, which makes sense, because there were a lot of WASPy
\n“Old Virginia” guys at William and Mary with names like Biff or Buff
\nor Ridge. So you think, what the hell, and you add him, and within
\nminutes your wall is peppered with posts like “Spiffy McGee feels a
\ndeuce coming on” or “Spiffy ate the worm!” with photos to prove it.
\nThen you feel pressure to say what you’re doing to outwit Spiffy, so
\nyou write: “Steve is in a Honey Smacks mood this morning.” Seriously,
\nI wrote that.
\nFacebook status updates are the literary equivalent of inane
\ncell-phone chatter, like when you’re on Amtrak and the man in front of
\nyou can’t stop talking loudly on his Bluetooth for one second, so
\nyou’re stuck sitting behind him and have to listen to stuff like: “Hi,
\nhoney, I’m on Amtrak now. I’m sitting in my seat now. I’m taking off
\nmy coat now.” Yes, I could always sit in the Quiet Car, but one of the
\nlast times I did that the train attendant kept waking me up every five
\nminutes yelling: “This Is The Quiet Car! This Is The Quiet Car!”
\nBeing on Facebook is like volunteering to receive spam, and the more
\nsuccessful you are at finding friends, the more spam you get! In the
\nend, Facebook is really the emptiest, loneliest place on the whole
\nWorld Wide Web. It’s all static and white noise, and the steady
\nstreams of status updates start to look like ASDF, ASDF, ASDF after a
\nwhile.
\nSo I’ve decided now to do something more worthy and productive with
\nall of my new free time. I’m going back to the original reality-based
\nFacebook, the local bar where everybody knows your name, which for me
\nis Off The Record at the Hay-Adams Hotel here in D.C. Status updates
\nthere are said in real time to real people, like: “That guy’s got a
\nproblem with alcohol. I see him every time I come in here,” or “How
\nwould the Civil War have changed if Abraham Lincoln had octopus
\ntentacles instead of a beard?” (Thanks, Cliff Clavin). So goodbye,
\npotential and former Facebook pals, all 150 million-plus of you, and
\nhello, John Boswell, the best bartender in America. If any of you need
\nto get in touch, check the third stool in, right side. If you want to
\nfriend me, buy me a beer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you have not seen this already, its’ worth a read : By Steve Tuttle | Newsweek I was a late convert to Facebook, the social-networking site that turned five years old Wednesday. I joined about a year ago at age 47, swept up in the massive wave of people turning the corner to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"yoast_head":"\n