By Mike King
After much deliberation, I’ve finally done it. I’ve deleted my Facebook page.
What a relief. No more unhealthy insight into other people’s lives, constant bombardment with pointless Facebook applications or inane alerts about Facebook ‘friends’ joining ridiculous groups or changing their profile picture for the twentieth time this week.
Of course, when I say I’ve deleted it, I actually mean that I’ve de-activated it. That’s as much as Facebook will let you do. As far as I can tell, it isn’t possible to delete my Facebook page entirely. It’s de-activated but remains dormant, just in case I want to log back in at any point in the future (no doubt this is a ploy Facebook uses to ensure its membership figures can never go down). Like the Freemasons, anyone who joins can never officially leave.
I was never an avid Facebook user. Truth be told, I’ve never got into the full spirit of it. It always seemed a bit silly to me, competing to have the most fake friends, throwing virtual sheep and poking people. If I’m honest, I only joined Facebook for a laugh. My eldest daughters were on it along with some people at JK, but the main reason was to wind up my youngest daughter, who said that the thought of me on Facebook made her feel physically sick.
So, I collected some naff, bogus celebrity friends like Rolf Harris, Ron Atkinson and Theo Walcott, embarrassed my daughters a bit and then got fed up with it.
It was OK while it was a novelty, but I find the mixture of work colleagues, clients, friends, family and fake friends a bit of an uneasy mixture. Having too much insight into my daughters’ social lives, frankly, isn’t healthy. Nor is having clients able to see photos of me drunk on Christmas day that have been posted by others.
Of course, I can see that Facebook has its place for some people. My daughters love it (even more when I tell them I’m de-activated). And I imagine it’s great for people with no social lives or for tracking down people you’ve lost touch with (though at my age, that usually means they’ve died).
Online social networking can be useful, which is why I’m on LinkedIn for instance, but ultimately I just prefer to keep in touch with my friends by phoning them, writing to them or maybe even meeting them in the pub.
Then again, maybe it’s time to admit that I’m just getting old...
(Though at least I'm not alone)
Comments