Why not to cancel your Facebook account: A bit of a rant

[Gordon_Sims]

I know a lot of people have problems with Facebook and some of the drama and animosity that seems to go hand in hand with it. I hear a lot of people advising others to just delete or deactivate their accounts. However, I think this might be hasty advice. Between us, my wife and I have about half a dozen friends who have deleted, deactivated or quit checking their Facebook accounts over the last couple months. A couple of them were more casual acquaintances but still people we enjoyed interacting with on there. The rest, though, were close friends and family members. All except one of them live out of state, and they’re all the sort of people who don’t answer their phones or emails. Except for getting together in person (which was always coordinated on Facebook), our only means of communicating with them was on Facebook. To make matters worse, none of them announced that they were doing this or provided any alternate means of communications. This includes the ones with whom we’d been having ongoing conversations, or from whom we were expecting responses to messages and/or invitations. We’ve only been able to get in contact with two of the people who have done this. One, who is out of state, said that over 95% of the people she had on there were neighbors, church members or family members who live nearby and who she sees regularly so they all knew she’d quit using Facebook and could just drop by her house if they needed to see her. The other is someone here in town who we just happened to run into at the store. Something pretty drastic had apparently happened (she wouldn’t give details) which caused her to go from using it almost constantly one day to completely deleting her account the next. Both of these people have cell phones but almost never answer them so our odds of staying in touch are extremely low. As for the others, we heard from mutual friends that they’d either grown tired of it or had extremely bad interactions with family and quit using or deactivated/deleted their accounts. Again, these are folks who are impossible to reach by phone so it’s not only very annoying but cuts deeply into our sparse social life.

If you have a Facebook account and certain people on there are making your life miserable, unfollow, unfriend or block them. If that means cutting out 90% of your friends list, go ahead and do that. If you still feel you need to close your account, have the courtesy to give the people you still want to keep in touch with some means of reaching you. And, no, saying, “Just stop on by,” doesn’t cut it. If you have a cell phone, keep it charged at all times and actually answer it when it rings. If I send you an email, respond to it! Don’t read it then tell me a couple months later when I happen to run into you at the grocery store that you saw it and enjoyed it. And if we’ve told you numerous times that my wife’s cell phone’s voice mail is unreliable, do like we’ve told you to do a thousand times already and call our home phone or my cell, or send one of us an email (or, you know, respond to the ones we’ve sent you). In other words, if you’re abandoning your social media lifestyle, you need to go back to living how you did back in 2007 before you’d ever heard of Facebook.

 

[ClearWater]

For a long time, I resisted Facebook. I was basically forced into it, because some programs I wanted to be involved with had it.

For another very long time, it wasn’t working. I’d get on Facebook, and nobody would talk to me.

Finally, I am talking to people who are already my friends from before, generally, but I just continue the relationship on Facebook. Other than that, only one family member, is in touch with me by Facebook, my niece.

Facebook has been really good for me. People can stick their pictures up for me to see, or vice versa, though I live in Mexico. I have very good friends I left behind in the US, and it’d be expensive to keep in touch by phone. A lot aren’t on e-mail really any more.

I can communicate, worldwide, cheaply. I used to do snail mail, and it’d take one month to communicate one way…one month to get a response, and many times, the mail would also get lost or stolen.

No way would I like to go back to life before the internet!

You wouldn’t believe how terribly I used to suffer due to the cost of international calling, lost and stolen correspondence, slowness, and having news outdated long before I received it.

Facebook is cool. If I don’t want to talk to someone, I unfriend them. If it’s really bad, I have the option to block them.

If someone really wants to stay in contact, they generally know what they are doing by unfriending the person and not leaving a forwarding address or phone number.

Now granted, some people get addicted, can’t get off it. Or, some have even gone into Facebook depression, seeing all these others with hundreds of “friends” and not feeling like one is measuring up.

I try not to have a problem, so, I like Facebook, now.

I’ve also used it to keep updated with organizations. For instance, I found out about all these organizations here in Mexico for people with disabilities. Now, I can easily find out when they are having their events, just by hitting, “friend”. They begin sending me pictures, invitations. If I get overwhelmed, I hit “unfriend”.

It used to be I didn’t know about all these events. In some ways, I’ve never been more connected.

I have one friend who lives in the US. I am in some ways closer to her now than when I lived in the US, all due to Facebook!

I resisted the cell phone. Finally, I broke down and got one. I didn’t want to keep updated with the computer, finally ended up taking classes at the library and buying a laptop.

I resisted Facebook, but now, I believe if I don’t stay up with the times, I might get left behind. So, like it or not, I try to stay on Facebook, and it’s helped me tremendously with my communication. For me, despite all its many flaws, I find it to have more benefits, for me, than drawbacks, everything considered.

 

[ClearWater]

Actually, if anything, Facebook gives me more friends. Well, I’ll go on there, and we’ll have a certain number of mutual friends. One time, one of these mutual friends sent me a message, said she thought she remembered me.

Though we’re not actually close, she posts stuff I tend to like.

I think my world has gotten better, expanded due to Facebook. It’s just a matter of finding how to deal with the new technology, to find a way to make it work for you, if possible.

I had one friend who used to refuse to have a TV or even a phone. It was MAJORLY inconvenient being his friend. Let me tell you! Communication was a huge problem with him, and he later wondered why he was so isolated.

Good luck with whatever you end up doing, though, and God speed!

 

[Gordon_Sims]

I enjoy Facebook for the most part, even some of the people I don’t at all see eye to eye with. It’s help me reconnect with some old friends and strengthen some other friendships. I think it’s a good means of communication as long as you don’t abuse it. As far as the friends who dropped out over the last couple months, these are people who were a bit of a hassle to keep in touch with before Facebook. Once they got on Facebook it was extremely easy to reach them on there but virtually impossible to get them any other way, unless you arranged a meeting, phone call or chat via Facebook. Now that they’re not on there, except for the few people we’ve talked to who live near some of them and can drop by at a moment’s notice, they’re virtually impossible to contact. We have upcoming plans with a couple of them so it’s extremely annoying that they took the sudden aversion to Facebook.

The funny thing is that this is basically the opposite of where we were with some people a couple years ago. We have some friends and family members who absolutely refused to get on Facebook. So many of the people we knew had started relying on it for the bulk of their communications and planning that the ones who weren’t on there kept missing out on things. They’re on it now, but it was due to mishaps with a couple of them that I started making a real effort to check my email more regularly. It would be nice if these others would have the same sense of courtesy.

 

[masondoggy]

I never really understood all the people who complain about FB. I mean really, if you don’t want to deal with drama, *use the block feature! *You can easily adjust your settings so certain friends can’t see your posts or so that you can’t see certain friends posts. And if you refrain from posting any personal information that you wouldn’t want published in the newspaper, you should have nothing to worry about. It’s that simple!

I enjoy Facebook. It allows me to keep up with many people in my life who I wouldn’t get a chance to see or talk to often, if ever. I’ve also gotten to know distant cousins that I never see or maybe only see once a year or so and allowed me to re-connect with old friends from the past.

 

[DaveBj]

I like Facebook. It has put me in touch with friends and relatives that I hadn’t heard from in years, and with a bunch of new friends as well. I have unfriended a couple folks with whom I realized that I had nothing in common, and I have also blocked a couple other people (friends of friends, not my own friends) whose posts were really annoying. Also I had one relative unfriend and block me, because I publicly disagreed with her position that Islam was all sweetness and light. But that’s another story.

The bottom line is that it is easy enough to not be exposed to whatever one doesn’t want to be exposed to – unfriend and block.

 

[Gordon_Sims]

I’m not sure why people have such strong feelings about Facebook and refuse to see it as just a communications tool. I’ll admit that I do a bit more than just straight, essential communicating with it, but I don’t thing twice about blocking someone who needs to be blocked. Of course, I knew people who really struggled with the idea of email at first and would always call when I emailed them instead of just responding to the email, oftentimes because they didn’t trust it.

I do know quite a few people who get worked up over how certain people behave on Facebook and let it upset them to the point that some of them have developed health issues over it. I always tell them to get rid of the people who are stressing them out but they refuse because they feel it’s rude or mean. I’m not sure how it’s any worse than someone attacking you every time you post anything at all on there, but that’s their mindset.

I did notice today that one of the kids of one of the people who quit using their account posted something about how his mom is now upset that she’s not hearing from anybody. This is one of the ones who refuses to pick up her phone. I’m hoping she puts two and two together soon.