Life without Facebook
A year without the biggest social network on my phone has made me a freer person
So you just view it in Safari, a friend asked with great bewilderment when I explained I didn’t have the Facebook app on my phone and the interactions he saw were though my iphone’s browser.
Just over a year ago I deleted Facebook from my phone. Soon after I deleted its companion Messenger app. I haven’t missed anything.
When I first wrote about it, my reasons were simple: we had a child and the usually useful notifications became a pest. Instead of notifying me about meaningful details, the app was trying to suck me back into it. It was biting the eyes that feed it, I thought.
My life without Facebook continues like it did before the 2.2-billionstrong Facebook became the organising principle it is now. I read the news sites and apps I trust. I stay in touch using a range of “old” technologies: I message my friends directly and call them to talk. I’ve always preferred direct interactions, which are more meaningful, if not quicker, than the loudhailer method of social media.
Occasionally I look at Facebook on my laptop, and go through my Messenger inbox to remind people of that old thing called e-mail.
Every now and then, usually when I am travelling, I download the app again for a week or so, and use it. Uploading pictures is easier via the app. On the occasion my friend saw me posting, there was no way to know it was via the smartphone’s browser.
I have written a lot about Facebook this year — from Cambridge Analytica to the hack of 30-million users’ data, to the strange and sycophantic role it now plays in our selfie-led online consciousness, to the disturbing way it has eroded our sense of personal privacy and become a tormenting source of one-sided comparative inadequacy (and sometimes depression) to our young people.
Facebook simply isn’t a part of my daily life. Perhaps that’s because my wife alerts me to major news about family and friends, but mostly it’s because I now use my phone in a more conscious way.
It began a few years ago and culminated in the app’s deletion, spurred on, no doubt, by time pressures. At first I just turned off the notifications — which I have now done for just about every app, except some messaging and news apps — until I noticed I never looked at Facebook.
It gave me a legitimate reason to delete Facebook, and I’m glad I did. As this year’s hand-wringing from the people who made smartphones, social networks and the algorithms that drive them has shown, social media isn’t the happy demonstration of democracy in action they thought they were building. It has been “weaponised”, as Tim Cook and Tim Berners-lee have warned — by the personal information-hungry “data industrial complex” that fuels the advertising-driven business models of Facebook, Google, Twitter and Youtube.
I am freer without social media.
Social media isn’t the happy demonstration of democracy in action its founders may have had in mind