A Genuine Article

My New Facebooking Plan for 1Q 2014

By Marc Carson · Tuesday December 31, 2013

Starting in January 2014, I’m doing a little experiment. I’m limiting my personal Facebook activity to two times a week, for 10 or 15 minutes. Whoa, here comes the crazy train!

I got a bit of a head start by a couple days, and so far this has been an amusing experiment. Facebook has been on my mental speed-dial for something like six years now. I find myself mindlessly opening a new tab, typing “fa Enter”, waiting for the page to load, then looking directly at that little globe icon to check for updates. Or, on a phone or other mobile device, I’ll press the little Facebook icon without even thinking about it.

At first I was a little timid to admit that I’m doing this. But I think there’s a good chance that if you use Facebook on a daily basis, you have considered limiting your use, too. I believe this is because of the way Facebook works.

As a prime example, I frequently catch myself spending pointless amounts of mental energy thinking about something that happened on Facebook:

• A friend liked something I posted.
• A friend posted or shared something new.
• I liked or commented on a post.
• I posted something.

Those are just the basics. Now the complications kick in:

• A friend liked something I posted, but I feel guilty because it’s been forever since I liked anything they posted.
• I like something a friend posted, but they never like my stuff.
• Something I posted or said didn’t get any likes at all.
• I commented on a friend’s post, along with lots of other people, and my comment was the only one that they didn’t like.
• By not being on Facebook today, I think I may be missing out on something important from someone I’m friends with or some organization I follow.
• I want to post something on Facebook, but I’m not sure if it’s (timely, appropriate, inoffensive, too personal, ignorant, too snooty, passive-aggressive).
• I’m posting something important to me, and it’s important that people who I (admire, tolerate, ignore, etc.) read it, comprehend it, like it, comment on it, and maybe share it if my stars are aligned correctly.
• I reconnected with a friend by adding them as a friend on Facebook, and now we are just sitting there, reconnected.
• Somebody else posted something and it’s hurtful to me.
• Somebody else posted something and it just goes to show how different they are.

Those last two points really bother me: Isn’t it troubling that Facebook is so incredibly great at showing us how different we are from our friends? This doesn’t happen as easily in friendships outside of Facebook. You can say that it’s useful to know about your differences, or that it makes you a wiser friend, but in reality I think it hurts people and causes them to feel more lonely.

I have a brilliant friend who once told me, “if software users aren’t behaving the way you want them to, you solve it with software.” In other words, you can change social behavior within software by changing the software itself in subtle ways. This really shocked me (thought control! Brainwashing! Well, maybe not brainwashing), and completely changed the way I look at interaction, website design, and software experiences.

In my opinion, Facebook’s software (that’s what Facebook is, software) currently provides an experience that can create a troubling imbalance of friend-gazing and unsatisfying self-narratives. I don’t think this is the real intent, but I think it’s part of what keeps people coming back when they have better things to do. And it does all this by exploiting the raw material of friendships, be they ever so fragile.

That’s just my theory. But right or wrong, I’ve found that reducing my time on Facebook makes all these problems go away! It’s beautiful.

When I tell other people my misgivings about Facebook use, they usually say something like, “I don’t take it too seriously; I just try to stay in touch with friends and it’s a fun diversion, nothing more.” It’s like the social media equivalent of “be cool, man.” I imagine a comic illustration, showing somebody staring into their phone at 3 a.m., bleary-eyed, declaring, “it’s a fun diversion. Nothing more.” It makes me laugh. I don’t buy into this fixed-position argument, except perhaps for people who haven’t used Facebook for very long, or who have already made a decision not to use it very much.

So we’ll see how this experiment goes. Will it pull me away from my friends, or bring me closer to them? Or will I be able to tell a difference of any kind? Will it deprive me of fun social activity and suck me deep into loneliness? Hey, let’s find out!

One final thing I had to consider: I’ll still need to spend time on Facebook for work, but fortunately most of that can be done in the allotted time. Speaking of work, how does the sort of theorizing I’m doing here reflect on a) the type of people who are likely to respond to Facebook posts and advertising, and b) the likelihood I’ll use Facebook for work in the future? And might this experiment affect my income (oh man, wouldn’t that be embarrassing if my income went up! Nervous laughter.) We’ll see.