Shobha has left the building…for now

I deactivated my Facebook account last night. Didn’t give any advance warning about it. Just pulled the plug. Of course, the kind folks at Facebook know that people are fickle, and that this web of emotion, information and entertainment they have built is irresistible. If you ever want to come back, they tell me, just login with your old name and password. Everything will be as it was before. For now, it is as though I never existed. My comments on other people’s posts have disappeared. Shobha Vadrevu has left the building.

I’ve received queries from flummoxed friends via e-mail, text messages and BlackBerry messenger about my reasons for dropping out of sight. This in itself proves that I don’t actually need Facebook in order to keep in touch with anyone. But of course keeping in touch in the sense of being able to contact people when you have something to say to them is not what Facebook is about.

It started out in a really fun way for me. It was the young people in my life (students mostly, but also some younger family members) who introduced me to it, urged me to join. So I nervously dipped my toes in, and then found myself enjoying the mode of interaction that was framed by the way my young friends used the platform. There were unwritten ethical rules which I quickly figured out and followed. Conversations were energetic and amusing, I got a view of my students’ world that increased my sympathy for them, and found that I actually liked them so much more because they weren’t just students anymore. As far as I was aware there was no judgment on either side. They were friends – in the Facebook sense of course, but also in a more nuanced sense that inhabits a middle zone between social networking nomenclature and ‘real’ friendship (whatever that means). My own experiences in managing my identity as a teacher and as a Facebook friend in my relationships with students even led to a Masters dissertation on teacher-student Facebook interactions. I loved the fact that I had a platform for expressing myself, an audience that enjoyed responding, and new experiences and encounters on a daily basis. I think Facebook trained me to need an audience for every little thing, although it was a while before this realisation dawned upon me, and even longer before it started becoming an emotional  and social burden. In the early stages, I loved the relationship performances that I felt I was conducting on my own little stage.

But then more grownups started joining Facebook, and the rules changed. More careful navigation and strategising became necessary. Kids don’t really care what you post. If they like it, they let you know. If they don’t like it they just roll their eyes and move on. Not so with adults. In a myriad subtle ways, I found that I was now being trained to be more careful about what I posted, how I responded. It would be naive to suggest that I didn’t have to be careful before. It’s also possible that peers are harder to manage than non-peers. Kids who were willing to ignore my transgressions may have been much harder on each other. As a teacher, I was insulated by a bubble of power, however much I downplayed it. In any case, I found that it got more tiring to perform my relationships in front of my ever-expanding public. It wasn’t just about fun and identity exploration anymore. I found myself having to add people based on other people’s recommendations, and for instrumental purposes. Work started to intrude into my private life in a big way, and my private life came under scrutiny by people who didn’t understand the cultural and emotional context in which I operated. In turn, I now had “friends” whom I didn’t feel an actual affinity for, and was horrified to find myself getting annoyed by their unconscious intrusion into my field of vision. They must have felt the same about me. My audience was now much more fragmented. Whom was I posting for? As I connected with more people whom I didn’t have a relationship with beyond Facebook, the emotional way in which I used the platform began to become a drain on my energy. And I did not know how to restrict my usage to instrumental functions.

And then Facebook came along and dealt the final blow to my already weakening ability to hold the threads of my Facebook identity together. Making the platform “much more social” is a misnomer, because it assumes that everyone treats “social” in the same way. Perhaps this is me becoming a grumpy old woman, but I see “more social” in terms of depth. The people at Facebook see it in terms of breadth. And that’s fine. It’s their platform, and they can do what they want with it. Likewise, I can do whatever I like as well. I choose not to have to deal with constantly moving targets of sociability and privacy (at least on Facebook, at least for now). I choose not to share my private life with people who don’t me well enough, and say “You seem to have a lot of time to spend on Facebook”, even though it hardly takes two minutes to post a status update, and I work in a manner that allows for little two-minute breaks every now and then.

Facebook says I can go back whenever I want to. Let’s see how long I’ll last. I’ve left the building, but apparently my stuff is still there.

PS: Got the “unfriend” picture here, the “spy” picture here and the “facebook” picture here.

Advertisement