After Having Left Facebook

It's been three weeks now since I've quit Facebook (again). 

So do I regret it?

Sometimes.  I regret it in those moments when I'm feeling empty and I can't turn to it to avoid the feeling.  I've also quit Twitter recently, so I can't turn there either.  What am I doing?  Where is this experiment going, exactly?  I need to remind myself of why I'm doing this, to quell the rising panic tide that threatens to rear up when seven empty moments in a row happen and I Have To Just Sit There And Let Them Happen!

I have quit social media to give myself (a) more space in my head, and (b) to try to keep in better contact with people I know in real life.  Although to be honest, it's not like I'm really going the whole hog with (a).  For that, I would need to get rid of the internet entirely.  And books.  And the TV.  See, those things in themselves have enough within them to fill up six lifetimes of headspace and emptiness avoidance.

When I consider this, and consider how I often feel a certain sort of emptiness that translates itself out into loneliness, I wonder why it is I am quitting social media, where Real Live People are, albeit pixellated.  Shouldn't I quit books instead?  Or the TV?  But then the TV has pixellated people on it as well.  And in my more cynical moments I think that that is all we become to each other on social media - like a TV that talks back.  As if we are all just packaged-up shows, not real people.  As if we are becoming our own reality TV.  That even though we interact with each other in those spaces, they make us to each other a little less like Real Live Boys and Girls and a little more like one more interchangeable pixel.

The problem with (b) is that I have hardly seen anyone in real life in the last three weeks outside of my lovely partner, and the dentist, and the assessing doctor at Centrelink, and the people I am doing a course with a couple of times a week, because I haven't had any extra energy.  So I haven't been able to put my non-Facebook-real-life into practice yet.

What complicates the whole situation is that when I am in periods of high anxiety, as I am now, my first instinct is to retreat from Real Live Boys and Girls in the flesh and go to something that feels safer in my anxiety for me to handle.  Which happens to be ... interacting with those same people online!  So you can see my dilemma, and why I'm feeling a little more lonely lately.


So do I regret quitting Facebook?  I regret it when I realise how many people don't seem to want to correspond with me unless I'm right there on Facebook.  I guess that's also the part that makes me glad to have left it. 

So I'm feeling a little bit Abandoned and Rejected and Not Loved and Not Cared About at the moment.  But perhaps my quitting FB made some other people feel Abandoned and Rejected and Not Loved and Not Cared About ... for seven seconds until they found another pixellated person to fill up the pixel-sized gap I may or may not have left.  How would I know?  I really don't know.  Perhaps there are people in my extended social circle who wish to keep in contact with me and who feel like I don't want to, and meanwhile I feel like they don't want to, and I will never know.


For all the awesomeness of technology, sometimes it feels to me that online interaction has taken all of our real-life relationships with each other and Picassoed them into a new version of themselves, where things that were once familiar are now all over the place.  Or perhaps it's just me.  You never can quite tell.  I mean, look at me - I'm complaining a little about feeling lonely and not cared about, yet I have a couple of people in my life who I call friends and who do do that.  So I am lucky.  But still this lonely feeling remains.  And what am I doing about it?  I am talking about it to the entire world.  Isn't there a disconnect here?  Feel rejected by people who in whatever fashion are within your social circle and you respond ... by talking about it online?

What a funny ole world, eh? :)

So, I am still to be able to see whether not being on social media changes my interactions with people offline.  Of course, what does worry me is that I will lose out on a whole bunch of stuff.  Stuff that people share online and then feel conversely like they have shared it with everyone and so then they won't share it with me when they see me.  Which would feel a little bit like being at a raging party without a drink ... or being out in the garden while the party goes on inside.  But still, I like it out here.  There is more space, sitting next to this tree.  And I hate parties anyway.  And I am not the only one out here.  Sometimes even those who are at the party come outside for the breather, after all :)

~ ~ ~

Edit:  Oh, and this.  This is why too.  With the Brittany thrown in as well, thanks.

A Wii Lad - one of JD Hancock's Little Dudes.

Leaving Facebook

So Rima Staines finally joins Facebook ...

... and I leave it.

Again.

I've done this before.  I know how it feels - the familiar jittery, "What the hell am I doing?" feeling.  The awful thought that you have removed yourself from the entire front loungeroom of the global house.  That you will probably lose touch with a whole bunch of people who if you never get on Facebook again you'll probably never talk to again.


The "What the hell am I doing?" feeling is like when you quit smoking.  It's a panic.  It's a wondering what you're going to do to fill up the space where you used to look at Facebook 30 times a day.

Which is exactly why I'm doing it.  I want more space.

I partially blame Rima's post.  Because this:

I have a theory that using the internet occupies a very particular place in us. I think it takes the place of dreaming. Not night-dreaming, but that very shamanic soul-travelling that we all do to a greater or lesser extent when our mind wanders, when we create art, when we day-dream, imagine, journey in our minds and spirits to elsewhere, elsewhen. Internet-travelling uses the same metaphorical muscle I think, but is utterly hollow in comparison because it is not creative in that same sense. It is not magical. And worst of all it replaces the dreaming.

This really speaks to me.  I haven't been writing much in recent weeks, after the latest sinus bout.  It fills up my head and makes it feel like there is not room enough both for sinus and for words.  And so I've fallen off the writing habit again for the moment.  But even if my head is relatively clear, it still feels full up with the internet.  With the mass amount of information I've taken in over one day that the majority of people in the entire history of the world would not take in over their entire lifetimes, I feel completely full, and often very overwhelmed, even when I'm rolling around inside the house all day all by myself with no work to do.  It's not very conducive to characterisation, to essay-writing, to thrumming.  And so while I can't get rid of the entire internet, I can at least get rid of Facebook.  Because it frees up space, and I know it does because it has done so before.  And I wish to fill that extra space with real-time interaction with breathing, living people, and real-time interaction with clay, with pens, and with the keyboard where I am writing stuff that sits in a document waiting to be added to tomorrow, instead of being pasted as a Facebook status update.

Rima is speaking about the internet as a whole, and I agree fulsomely that even if I quit Facebook, I still have to try to manage my internet info intake each day.  But Facebook is like the methamphetamine of the internet for me.  Even more so than Twitter, strangely.  Twitter annoys me too much for it to ever be a meth addiction.  Twitter is like a once a week bong-on sesh with your mates.  Facebook is like mainlining.  I need the space. 

I went outside before, after getting home from my Aged Care class, and sat, with my feet bare in the grass, and read a wonderful novel, and felt blissed out from the sun that had poked through the clouds on my way home and which was now heading his way in a slant over to the west.  And I made pictures out of the clouds, and thrummed in my dreaming space, and read a story set in the future generations and generations after a giant meteorite has hit the moon and flung it off its trajectory so that every seventh night it looms scarily close to the earth before moving away again in its new spheric orbit.  A story most certainly set elsewhen, further off into the future around a church of women, the Sisters of Selene, whose influence has already risen in their small periphery and, over several generations, now begins to wane.  It is a book captivating my attention, and hence I was incredibly rich sitting there, more than you could ever guess, out out on the grass, feet buried in grass, reading the words of an author who sounds like he's writing in some Icelandic country - his name is Torsten Krol, if he is indeed a he - but who apparently lives in Queensland.  There is apparently some mystery surrounding Torsten Krol, about whether he is a famous author writing under a pseudonym.  I think in some ways I like it like that - an anonymous writer.  There is sometimes something nice about not knowing who the author is, of the story just wafting to you all on its own.

But I also really like it when a piece of writing is attached to an author.  It's why I will always prefer blogs over Facebook, even as Facebook has stolen many bloggers away.  I prefer being able to go to read someone's extended thoughtfulness, where my reading is a little more longform, even if it means that I can read less, because it's more fun to spend time inside one person's mind for five minutes rather than flicking my attention between 13 different people in two.

And so my love-hate relationship with this online space, and my haggling with it over how much of an effect it gets to have on my attention span and mindspace continues.  Rima says it better:

But do you not also share my frustration and loathing for the way the internet has squirmed into our every minute, addicting us to updates, and overloading us with eons more information each second than we are naturally made to process in a lifetime? Even if we ignore the endless shite and horror that the internet contains, it is still spilling over with wonder. There are so many beautiful things out there, genuine heartfelt pieces of writing, ideas and images - too many - so we have learnt to skim, to take in only the bubbles from the top of every slowly crafted brew. And I for one feel this is not a true and considered honouring of these beautiful works, not to mention of the eyes and hearts and souls and bodies of the people who are consuming these streams of information every millisecond, utterly removed from the place and land where they sit, out in the ether somewhere, following a trail whilst their extremities get gradually colder and they forget to eat lunch.

... I speak from a concerned and somewhat frightened yet simultaneously grateful and amazed viewpoint. If we use this thing, we still need to remember the land on which we stand, remember our bodies and the faces of those we love. I think we should be frightened that all intercity trains these days are filled with blue-faced passengers, every one of them swiping their fingers across a tiny screen, oblivious of the people around them acting identically. If we use this thing, then we should use it to find other faces in the throng and go and really touch them, in real life. Arrange it so that you can look into their real eyes and hear their real stories. This amazing network can be used for proliferating inane fluff or it can be used to organize and gather for good and real reasons, and to stir souls.

Sometimes the soul you need to stir is your own.  To make more space for the daydreaming.  To not let connecting on Facebook replace connecting with people in real time.  To go cold turkey once again.  To disconnect to reconnect.  A mighty challenge for us all ~ internet newbies all as we are ~ to navigate.

is missing Facebook a little bit.

But not enough to rejoin.

Two friends separately asked me yesterday to rejoin Facebook so that we could keep up with each other more easily.  Even though we all know that texting and emailing and stuff are all other options with which to contact me.

And it's that strangeness which fuels the resistance that continues (although, admittedly, I did log on the other day for five minutes before I "deactivated" again  :)

Facebook

Okay.  So I've pulled the plug on Facebook (at least for the foreseeable future).

It reminds me a little of when I quit smoking (minus the intense cravings).  Life feels a little ... emptier.  There's a phantom limb feeling, a wondering what I'm going to do with my hands without a cigarette in them, when I get those creative little thoughts in my head throughout the day, the "That would be a cool status update" thoughts.

The emptier feeling is exactly why I have disabled my account.  Trying to fight the sensory overload.  For me, working on a computer that needs to be online, flicking over onto Facebook is akin to taking 137 tea breaks throughout the day, breaking down my boring worklife into 38,592 segments that leave me feeling disjointed and out of my own body and wasting time like you wouldn't believe.

The "wondering what I'm going to do with my hands" smoking analogy is a good one.  It  may sound strange that since closing my account I feel emptier.  I notice the difference in feeling a little lonely at times throughout the day as I work here alone.  It feels like extra space has appeared in-between the molecules now that I'm not seeing status updates for a whole lot of people I will never meet or will never meet again.  (That however doesn't include all of my Facebook friends.  There are a couple who I really am going to miss seeing their thoughts each day, like Erin, and Barbara, and Kent).

The extra space has already brought me back here to my blog.  How weird it is.  And I know it's going to take me back to my ratty old notebook again.  A place to write down all those pithy little sayings that would make good status updates, channel them maybe one day into something else a little larger than a soundbyte.

But geez, I'm gonna miss it.