Ivo Quartiroli is also the author of The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet
“It isn't easy to find an informed and critical look at the impact of digital media practices on human lives and minds. Ivo Quartiroli offers an informed critique based in both an understanding of technology and of human consciousness.” —Howard Rheingold
“Aware of the profound and rapid psychological and social metamorphosis we are going through as we ‘go digital’ without paying attention, Ivo Quartiroli is telling us very precisely what we are gaining and what we are losing of the qualities and privileges that, glued as we are to one screen or another, we take for granted in our emotional, cognitive and spiritual life. This book is a wake-up call. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates should read it.” —Derrick de Kerckhove
Intersecting media studies, psychology and spirituality, The Digitally Divided Self exposes the nature of the malleable mind and explores the religious and philosophical influences which leave it obsessed with the incessant flow of information.
The Table of Contents, the introduction and the first chapter of The Digitally Divided Self are available here
Facebook Logout
Experiences and Reasons to Leave it
Ivo Quartiroli
Published by Silens at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Ivo Quartiroli
Cover design by Moreno Confalone
ISBN-13: 978-88-97233-09-1
ISBN 10: 88-97233-09-0
silens
Milano – www.silens.org
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Musings about Facebook
Facebook Changes the Concept of Friendship
This Time I Really Want to Leave it for Good
Amplifier of an Inner Discomfort
An Affection-Compensating Tool
From Village to Global Village
Reliving my Earlier Nightmares
You Always Have to Feed the Beast
A Narrowed Down Tunnel-Vision Style of Contact
Chapter 1: Musings about Facebook
The Quality of Relationships
Does participating in social networks improve the quality of our offline relationships or expand the number of our real connections? Not according to a study titled “Use of Social Network Sites and Instant Messaging Does Not Lead to Increased Offline Social Network Size, or to Emotionally Closer Relationships with Offline Network Members.” According to this study, “time spent using social media was not associated with larger offline networks, or feeling emotionally closer to offline network members. Further, those that used social media, as compared to non-users of social media, did not have larger offline networks, and were not emotionally closer to offline network members.” (Pollet, 2011).
Privacy Issues
There are then many issues surrounding privacy and the way Facebook uses our interactions to accumulate data on people to better target its advertisements.
In September 2011, Facebook again triggered serious concerns about privacy issues. Dave Winer wrote an article about how Facebook scared him (Winer, 2011). Winer was writing in response to the new Facebook API, which allows applications to post status items to Facebook timelines without a user’s intervention or approval. As Nik Cubrilovic said, “you may accidentally share a page or an event that you did not intend others to see.” (Cubrilovic, 2011). Standard advice was to make sure to log out of Facebook, but Nik discovered that was not enough. “Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit that has Facebook integrated.” While “the only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate browser for Facebook interactions”, the high majority of users don’t have the skills or are not even aware of this privacy concern (Cubrilovic, 2011).
In 2011, an Austrian student named Max Schrems started a campaign and Web site called “Europe versus Facebook,” much to Facebook’s consternation. In Europe there is a law stating that a company, if requested by individuals, must make available any data about the individuals that the company possesses. Max Schrems asked Facebook about his data, and he received a CD containing the data in response, which he patiently studied. He received a 1,222 page PDF-file that listed his personal information, where he found many surprises. For instance, he saw information that he had long ago deleted. By analyzing the data Facebook sent him, he inferred that Facebook had broken European rules about data protection several times.
He also discovered that Facebook hid information that was not available. Among the hidden information, the Web pages people visited that contained a “Like” button, which, through cookies, are collected by Facebook for all users. Any Web page visited containing a Facebook like button is being traced, regardless of the fact that the user may not actually click any button.
Max Schrems then made 22 complaints against Facebook in the form of a letter to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, detailing the issues regarding privacy and data retention. He made it clear that Facebook keeps much more data about us than we are aware of, and also keeps data about people who do not even have Facebook accounts, by tracing Facebook people’s contacts on other sites, as Yahoo mail or by user’s searching for names. Let review just few of the complaints Max made:
- Shadow Profiles. Facebook collects as much information as possible about its users, but also about non-users. Facebook accesses the personal data of users through synchronization of mobile phones, by importing contacts from email providers and instant messaging/chat software, or by sending invitations to people. By collecting this information, Facebook creates profiles even of people who have never signed into Facebook, without them being aware of it. Through this data, Facebook can easily infer sensitive and private information about political or religious opinions or sexual orientation. The power of data mining to determine our ideological or psychological attitudes is beyond most people’s imaginations.
- Deleted posts. On the PDF file received by Facebook, Max saw random old wall posts, shares, and status updates which had been deleted by him. This means that Facebook retains those information illegally.
- Deleted messages and chats. Facebook also seems to retain deleted messages and chats, which is even more serious because it relates to the privacy of correspondence. Max was also concerned about Facebook’s plans to be an email provider, giving email addresses to people @facebook.com. If they were to do so, even people without a Facebook email address who exchanged email with any Facebook user would have their correspondence retained.
- Pokes and removed friends. Facebook allows people to “poke” other users. Poked users will receive messages informing them that they have been poked. When a user deletes his pokes, Facebook keeps them. Also, removed friends are kept by Facebook, creating potential problems, for instance, for people in countries where government agencies may want to find out information regarding previous relationships. Facebook, like any other Internet company, agrees to give information to government agencies.
Government agencies can view your Facebook profile to mine your data and other people’s data about you. “If you don’t have anything to hide then you have no reason to worry”, they say. But is not reassuring knowing that some controlling agency knows my political opinions, my friends, and whatever I write to them about in my personal messages. We never know how our data are going to be used or even misunderstood. Facebook does not disclose when and how often they allow such data mining by agencies.
In addition, Facebook’s standard privacy settings are “very liberal” and most users are not aware that they are sharing their information with a larger number of people than they intend to. Also, Facebook’s group mechanism is designed in such a way to allow any “friend” to add anybody to a group without the person being able to prevent it. Even after leaving a group, such information is retained, thus never removing evidence of a user’s relationship to the group.
As Facebook users, we are actually working for Facebook for free, building their huge, functional database for ad targeting. On January 2012 Facebook will introduce the more invasive “Sponsored Stories”, actually ads between friends’ news feed.
Children
Millions of children aged 12 or younger have profiles on Facebook, despite the fact that the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (Coppa), prohibits Web sites from storing personal data about children under age 13 without parental permission. Facebook is lobbying against this rule by hiring former Bush and Obama officials to push its agenda, as described by The New York Times in October 2011 (Bazelon, 2011).
In spite of the fact that there are millions of children being harassed on the site, Facebook understands that instilling the idea of “sharing” at such a tender age can act as an imprinting on children. Children are unlikely to erect barriers to protect their privacy and will not challenge the rules. To force more sharing, the default settings are tricking people into sharing much more then what they are aware of, or what they intend to. Facebook understands, just as priests have long understood, that if children are educated from an early age in accordance with specific intentions, they will belong to the educator forever.
Though, social media is not always a happy place for kids. According to a Pew Internet study titled "Teens, kindness and cruelty on social network sites," 88% of teen social media users have witnessed mean or cruel behavior and 15% have been targets of such behaviors (Pew Internet, 2011).
Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking presented in december 2011 a study titled "The Pervasiveness, Connectedness, and Intrusiveness of Social Network Site Use Among Young Adolescents" (Espinoza, 2011). The goal of the study was to examine the extent to which young adolescents use social netwroks, with whom they connect via these sites, and whether social networks use disrupts daily functioning. Among the social network users (73% of the adolescents who go online), "39% reported getting behind on schoolwork and 37% reported losing sleep".
Research by the Kaiser Foundation titled “Children’s Media Use and Sleep Problems” (Zimmerman, 2008) found that both the quantity and quality of sleep of American children have deteriorated over the years, posing “major adverse implications for their cognitive ability, judgment, behavior and physical health. . . Inadequate sleep can bring or worsen a range of problems: obesity, aggression, hyperactivity.”
The total sleep time of children ages 1–5 diminished two hours a day between 1981 and 2005, and continued to decline in a more recent study.
Several important functions take place in the body and the brain during sleep. While the body is repairing and growing tissue and improving its immunity, the mind is consolidating memories and absorbing the learning of the waking hours, developing cognition and improving psychological health. The study reports that loss of only one hour of sleep per day for three days can impair neurobehavioral function significantly.
During puberty children often need more sleep than before, though its timing shifts to later in the diurnal cycle. However, peer pressure and lessening of parental influence lead to adolescents averaging two hours less than the nine hours of sleep needed.
The interactivity of the Internet and video games that has become pervasive over the past two decades causes more engagement, increases alertness hormones, and inhibits users from limiting the activity. While TV shows have a defined beginning and ending time (I definitely don't want to say TV is better than Internet!), this is not the case with the Internet, electronic games and phone use.
Most new forms of media are interactive, generate light, or (like social networks) involve more interpersonal and emotional involvement – all of which further delay sleep time of kids.
Exposure to light decreases secretion of melatonin that supports sleeping. The nearer a light and the higher its intensity, the greater the melatonin suppression. Computers and video games are the biggest culprits. While good sleep is promoted by physical activity, this can be countermanded by media use. Disturbing to note is that sleep problems that arise in middle childhood tend to become chronic.
Facebook Changes the Concept of Friendship
Friendship is something to be achieved over years of deep and intimate connection, not by clicking on a small picture and requesting it. As much as we can be aware of the differences between embodied friendship and the social network version, as every politician knows, a lie repeated hundreds of times becomes truth.
One of the reasons for the success of Facebook is that friends were supposed to be such. Usually, in social networks and dating sites we meet people who are alien to our real-life narratives. Even though these “just online” contacts can bring interesting connections, in most cases such “friends” come and go and the connection doesn’t go much in depth. Missing a real-life narrative beyond the Net, the connection between people doesn’t sink as deep as in an authentic and almost “organic” place.
So Facebook came to the rescue as a way to connect with people we know and those we knew in the past but with whom we lost touch. Even though the invitation game of picking friends and friends of friends expands and I ended up with some contacts I barely know, with maybe half of them I shared important parts of my life, parts of our histories which shaped our lives.
But I am resistant to participating in Facebook with real friends, for the very reason that we had such important connections. So until now I didn’t look for friends to add on Facebook and I seldom open the site, not much more than accepting the requests I had until now.
Since most of the people who request for friendship know I’m a long-time Internet user and former Internet book publisher, sometimes I need to tell them that I rarely open Facebook and I’m not deliberately ignoring them. Actually, the situation poses an inner strife, a sort of double bind: since people are there on the site, it doesn’t look nice ignoring them, but at the same time I don’t want to be engaged further in one more online toy.
Of course, we can say that for every level of communication there are different areas and that we can choose the medium according to the depth and intimacy we need. With intimate people I can choose other ways too for communicating. The medium can vary greatly from telephone calls to personal meetings and body/mind contacts at any level from hand-shaking to making love.
But Facebook, like many other Web applications, tends to expand its scope and include more aspects of our lives, and can also easily become addictive. It starts with a cool way to connect, then it adds feature after feature, then it becomes essential to not get isolated from the group of friends and, finally becomes one more window that feeds on our time and scant attention. In being active much on Facebook I sense the risk of digitalizing even those real and important relationships and consequently of trivializing our rich histories. I also sense the risk of creating a cyber-elite by excluding friends who aren’t on the Internet or who access the Net rarely, friends who don’t have the time or the desire to get wired or locked in social networks.
Anytime I connect to the site I see a number of updates. As I browse through those short sentences, my online experience, like that of many other people, is made up of other open Web pages and applications competing for my attention. While one friend is planning a trip, another is going to sleep, one more is sad (even though “negative” feelings aren’t expressed that much, generally speaking) and yet another is enjoying music. It seems to me to be more like TV, where tragic news are immediately followed by gossip and vice versa, where everything melts in an anesthetized flow of news with no connection with our inner states.
I don’t want to become numb in the felt connection with my friends as I might be with a TV or movie character. Every input we get from a person who is a valuable connection for us takes time and attention to assimilate and interact with, especially if it’s something which isn’t trivial. But time and attention are scarce resources when we are on the Net and depth is mostly avoided. Perhaps this is the reason why we read much less about difficult and challenging inner states on Facebook and in general on other social networks. For those there are the “hugs and love sending” applications.
I sense as well the risk of considering myself exempt by keeping more direct contacts with people, substituting them with writing a few updates about myself on Facebook. Even in this case, we could say that one medium doesn’t have to substitute another, but our time and attention resourses are limited and don’t grow at the pace of computer speed.
One other risk I sense is to homogenize the rich variety of ways with which I interact with individual persons. With every friend whom I interact with in a deep way, a unique relationship is being created, almost an entity in itself, shaped in time from the alchemy of two souls meeting.
In the meanwhile, I rediscovered plain old email communication, which was the only way to communicate when I started working online 15 years ago. From time to time I email updates about my life to a group of friends who are more present in my life. Email is simple and more environment-friendly, uses little bandwidth, and is accessible from any computer, even very old ones, by very slow Internet connections and by most mobile phones too. Facebook pages usually take a long time to show if the Internet connection is not fast. Email is more direct and personal, giving almost the feeling of letters.
The lack of gimmickry in email writing gives space to more direct connections between words and internal states: we need to fill words from the inside, rather than choosing applications or writing a quick update or comment.
I don’t care about my friends’ links, verbalized thoughts and short notes on Facebook. Not that I don’t care about them or about their considerations on life, but I know that every thought is ephemeral, and more so when we are online, and our minds are sequestrated by a tsunami of information. Also, I know that sharing thoughts on Facebook outside of a life narrative or a certain context doesn’t make me feel more connected to the person.
The Inner Reasons to Leave
Beyond the privacy issues, I feel that the stronger concerns happen on the inner level, where it changes our attitude with the people we care and even the connection with our inner life. Some of my concerns are:
If an event of my life has already been shown and discussed on Facebook, there's the risk that there will be less freshness in my sharing personally with people about it.
Social networks delude us into thinking that we can regain the connections with people we lost in time and the associated feelings. The reality is that most of those old friends who ask for friendship remain in a frozen state after a couple of messages, if ever sent.
Meeting on Facebook is like meeting in a room full of people, with a lot of noise and everyone asking for our attention at once. Yes, we can always stop and give 100% attention to somebody, but the pressure of so much information is usually too strong.
Browsing the small pictures of people creates an anesthetic condition. Everything become homogenized, and the interaction is limited by Facebook’s user interface . Even though we have many options to interact with somebody on Facebook, nonetheless we circle inside a limited set of inner states with no body language involved. Not only we miss all of the energetic qualities of a real meeting, but also we miss the attention which the endless flow of information weakens.
I don't need more friends. I need to be more in touch with the friends I already have. Parallel to the growth of social networks, sociological studies say that there is a decrease in the number of intimate friends in people’s real lives. There is also the risk that friends who aren't on social networks will be neglected.
In the moment that I make an online friend, it appears that I am “relieved” of having a personal and real connection with him. I have outsourced my relationship with him to Facebook, which will give me news about him at the proper time and will keep him updated about me.
What I read on Facebook doesn’t tell me whether the person walks his talk. Since the mind can simulate anything, we don’t have a clue whether wise words are backed by actual experience or not. It reminds me of the story of the mother who had a son who ate too many sweets. Worried about his health, she consulted a monk, whose wisdom would convince her son to stop. The monk told her to come back in two weeks. The mother returned, and the monk said to the son, “It’s no good to eat too many sweets.” The mother, perplexed, asked the monk why he waited two weeks to make such a simple statement. He replied that it had taken that time to conquer his own indulgence. Whether words on Facebook are rooted in experience and wisdom—or not—is not known. While even face-to-face communication can deceive, on Facebook, we have even more tools to create an image of ourselves which may not correspond to what we really are. Knowing personally maybe around a third of my Facebook contacts, I know that at least some of the people who broadcast their wise thoughts daily do not walk their talk in real life.
In June, I received my birthday greetings on Facebook. It was weird to get tens of happy birthday messages on my wall and not know whether they had smiled, or if they had dedicated more than a few seconds while browsing other people’s messages, email, web sites, chat windows, and who knows what else. I have never met in real life most of the people who greeted me. Some of them I don’t even know or remember who they are. None of the people who left me a birthday message called my phone. Nonetheless, I connected myself, for a few seconds as well, with the people who sent greetings. Yet, I actually only saw my inner mental projection of them, which is unrealistic, as there are fewer reality checks. And I myself became a bit more unreal as well.
The Logout Process
When you are ready to delete your Facebook account, you can read these resources.
Read the wikiHow page, How to Permanently Delete a Facebook Account, or even join the Facebook group, “How to permanently delete your Facebook account.”
A useful article appeared in The Telegraph in December 2011 titled, “How to: delete your Facebook account, and adjust key privacy settings.”
When you start the deletion process, Facebook will resist by making it technically challenging and by sending subtle messages, such as saying that your friends “will no longer be able to keep in touch with you.” Facebook is trying to make you feel like a lonely wolf, isolated from people, disconnected from the world and sources of love and care. Just don’t let those guilt trips take root in your mind. Facebook is not your source of love and care. Facebook (and other Internet giants) digitally manipulates our need for love, for understanding, and to be seen, wanting to become the only way that people keep in touch with people and share with them.
Did I delete my Facebook account? Not completely. I keep a passive presence on Facebook to remain aware of the transformations happening on the site. For a while, my choice has been to have a minimal presence and use it less and less. Actually, I never use Facebook much. I am one of those users who shares a link every once in a while and writes a comment once every two weeks or so.
I began to leave Facebook gradually by avoiding being caught by the entertainment of the endless notes, links, YouTube videos, and comments. Without a doubt, some of the content is deep and interesting, but once on Facebook these comments are processed by an inner state that doesn’t allow sustained concentration or depth. The political content rarely morphs into action. The word “slacktivism” has been coined to identify this phenomenon of armchair activism. Various appeals and different causes risk counting in the real world as much as a discussion between prisoners during the air hour.
I am interested in Eastern spirituality and receive a lot of content in this area posted by my friends. This is somehow a paradox since spiritual paths are supposed to be beyond the mind and its “drunken monkey” attitude, which jumps from one place to another with no inner direction and no awareness. The endless chatter of the restless mind reaches stillness through meditation and inner observation, and the Internet makes this difficult. The mind wants to be in charge even of the spiritual and the beyond-the-mind state, but this can be done by the mind only on the mental level as a pale simulation of the real state. Meeting an embodied spiritual teacher and practicing meditation are the best ways to approach spirituality, but after that there’s nothing like reading a paper book by a spiritual teacher in a quiet setting to allow the teaching to reach a place where Facebook and, in general, online interaction cannot.
After avoiding getting involved in the endless chatter, I went ahead one more step in detaching from Facebook by not using it anymore as an email system. There’s no point in sending emails to people through Facebook, even if we use our own mailer software to reply instead of logging in to Facebook. The email goes through Facebook anyway before reaching our recipient’s mailbox, so there’s no need to let Facebook process our private emails. Now, when somebody sends me a message on Facebook, I reply through his email address or ask for it if I don’t know it.
Then, I limited my use of Facebook only as a sort of StumbleUpon site (from which, by the way, I get more visits to my blogs than from Facebook) where I share the articles I write on www.indranet.org and www.innernet.it, and almost nothing else. At the time of the publication of this book, I stopped doing even this little, leaving my presence on Facebook as just an observer. Given my rare appearances on Facebook, fewer and fewer people contact me. After all, if you are not active by commenting, writing on the walls and, in general, by scratching their backs, people tend to ignore you. But I don’t miss this, as I connect with my friends outside Facebook.
Facebook undoubtedly is the best engineered social network site, nevertheless I foresee the fall of its popularity as it has happened with other very popular sites such as Second Life or MySpace. Facebook will be more persistent than the others because it is strongly linked to people we know in real life and there's a base of hundreds of millions of users. But as the mind has constructed the game of Facebook, the mind will dismantle it. The mind loses interest about everything, especially if something remains only on the mental plane. Facebook’s strength consists in being a bridge between the purely mental world and the world of real relationships. In this reciprocal exchange between the virtual and the real on one hand some virtual meetings can be “real-ized” but on the other hand real people can become “digitized,” reducing them in our psyche to a small icon and a flow of bytes which scroll on the screen.
I collect experiences from people around the world (many from Italy since that is my country) by sending emails to my contacts and through posts on my blog. I receive interesting responses, which I show in the next part of this booklet. If you also want to contribute your experiences for inclusion in a possible new edition of this book, send me an email through the contact page.
Chapter 2: Logout experiences
All Your Time or Nothing
My Facebook experience has been simple. I was on Facebook for a few months, maybe a year, and then I took the exit route. I already have difficulties answering emails from the people with whom I have an ongoing dialogue. I lack the time and motivation to carry on conversations with other people that I barely know or do not know at all.
Some friends tell me that they made contact with interesting people and carry out interesting conversations on Facebook. I have a feeling that you are either willing to invest a lot of time or that it is better not lose a single minute. I chose the second option.
Augusto Shantena Sabbadini, Milan, Italy
This Time I Really Want to Leave it for Good
Although I haven't exactly left, I have spent less and less time using the service. The only reason I haven't deactivated it completely is because while my partner is overseas, it is one of the few ways I wait for her to come online and chat. The other is that because most of my friends have Facebook and I've just recently started my own blog, I am using Facebook to promote my blog.
The reason I wanted to add my attitude towards Facebook is because I, like you in many ways I guess, was always resistant to it for a long time. It took me almost 3 years before I decided to make my own account and then once it was there, I found myself using it more and more frequently. However, every three to four months I introspectively consider what I have been doing and the thought of spending hours on end using Facebook makes me shudder.
I have deactivated Facebook 5 times in the past 2 years but (rather weakly) have always found reason to crawl back. This time however, I really want to leave it for good. I guess I made a deal with myself to promote my blog for the first few months before I deactivate it for good. One of the reasons I feel that leaving Facebook now would work is because of the encroachment and arrival of Google+ (unfortunately Australian's like myself and my friends have yet to migrate in strong numbers). In my personal opinion, G+ is a far improved way of expressing yourself creatively and building your network.
The small number of users and arrival of new ones also allows you to reconnect with friends more intimately. Plus I find the Circles service a great way to keep your friendships on social networks far from public scrutiny and stalkers. So for these reasons I will definitely be deactivating my Facebook once I find that my blog has built a good following.
Other motivations to leave Facebook include:
- The frequency of what I term repeated and boring 'news updates' from some of my friends
- The lack of intimate conversation with my close friends
- The illiteracy (well among most of my networks anyway)
- The lack of creativity and re-sharing of good posts
- The explosion of 'Check-Ins' which really gets on my nerves for those regulars
- The amount of complaints from certain groups (I know you're from Italy so you wouldn't understand but Australian's have been shown to be the biggest whiners in the world)
Those are my reasons for wanting to leave Facebook. I hope your book goes well. I look forward to reading it.
Male, 22 years old, Southeast Asian living in Sydney, Australia
Bad Energy
I left Facebook years ago after a few weeks of use because I felt disgusted and had unpleasant sensations at an energetic level. I also knew that it is a sort of a monitoring system that can be used as a means of registration and control by entities of power. What became most obvious to me was that I decided that my life should NOT be spent at home in front of a screen, but that I should have real and living relationships with nature, people, and things. To leave Facebook and leave no trace, I had to resort to a procedure that was not so easy. They don’t make it easy to leave it, but you can quit!
Daniele Bricchi, Piacenza, Italy
Amplifier of an Inner Discomfort
As for Facebook, I have a relationship with it that is sometimes “suffered” and sometimes playful. However, my impression of the medium is that it remains neutral in itself and an amplifier of an upstream discomfort or issues I might have in my life.
I also opened two pages with the intention of promoting my new projects. It is true that the publication of events to give them greater visibility is becoming more like spam. I receive between 20 to 30 notifications from events each day that annoyingly accumulate and that I delete with a simple click. So I guess this is more or less my fate also.
In the end, Facebook is an unending film of confusing and self-referential messages that also—and I speak from my own experience—constantly refer to a form of comparison, bringing to the forefront a sort of competition (not necessarily intentional) by collecting more “likes” and by keeping up high-frequency posting.
On Facebook, everyone seems spiritually awakened or on the threshold of an awakening. The shadow side has been expertly left out. There is more attention to having followers than on cooperation, on showing off rather than meeting and caring for the friend. Personally, I have asked for very few friends and those that asked for my friendship in the end proved to crave the eyes of potential and future customers.
What sense of inner discomfort does Facebook highlight in my case? And I say highlight because it is clear to me that the source of my discomfort doesn’t come from the medium (although I have not thought directly about this point). Sometimes there’s a feeling of inadequacy and imperfection in promoting myself, and the feeling of fomo (fear of missing out). Then I look for something amazing to get the attention of the group of people or the proper ways to feel belonged to the group. I try to, as much as I can, keep a form of inner witnessing about the inner motivations of my actions on Facebook.
Recently, I was writing for a corporate blog and I wasn’t on Facebook much as before, but the feeling of needing to say things that are supposed to be very deep and spiritual remained. There wasn’t much space for vulnerability.
I find meeting with the young souls of new “explorers” to be positive. I appreciate the ease and speed at which this can happen on Facebook.
As a long film of ruffled thoughts, Facebook reminds me of the mechanism of the thought process. Even with thoughts, we can have a suffered, playful and, why not, creative relationship.
At the moment, it is not my intention to leave or to dwell too much on Facebook.
Elsa Nityama Masetti, Tuscany, Italy
Looking Through the Keyhole
It is difficult to say what Facebook is for me. Surely, it is somehow a part of me, of the virtual me, and like many things in life, the approach, the ideas, and the importance I give to this part of me are constantly changing.
I signed on before Facebook was known as it is now, but when it was for me just a place to create a simple collection of links. Then, when it exploded into something that resembles what it is now, it became at times a suffocating medium, a place where I found it difficult to detach from the games. Now, at least I am free of those hooks.
Facebook has also been a way to look through the keyhole into the lives of others, especially women. Today, this aspect has become more a curiosity than anything else. I no longer obsessively seek virtual female friends, also because I sometimes realize that in the bulimic act to seek friendships using the excuse of some similarities, I have fattened the number of friendships I have, surpassing 1,000.
Sometimes I wonder who she is, what does she mean to me, how did she come to me, and how did I arrived at her? Obviously, there are no answers in these cases, as when driven by a chemical hunger there is little point to choosing what is actually eaten. Through Facebook, I was able to get in touch with a lot of distant relatives and old college students that I lost track of after many years.
Through this medium and a shared vision, I was also able to get to know and then meet some people with whom I created a beautiful friendship, even though we do not meet often. They are great sharing friendships, primarily by email, allowing me to go deep easier than when I meet someone in person, and in a way this is a trap.
To escape from the shallowness, over the years I have taken refuge behind a screen, to get in touch virtually in a “realistic way” with some people. More than once, I fell in love with a girl online. While recently thinking about some of those girls and the mountains of fantasies that I have created around their images, I wondered how I came to be amazed by someone whom maybe I met earlier in person.
Now, in addition to sharing links as I did when Facebook was different from what it is now, I have created a couple of groups on topics that interest me, to prevent sharing with people interested in the topic to be dispersed into the general stream. For obvious reasons, following everything in the general stream cannot be done even if there are machine-gun “posters” that hide what might interest me under piles of garbage.
Several times, I have thought about removing my Facebook account when I realized how much time I wasted. Now, I have found a certain compromise, and try to use the medium in a useful way. I do not always succeed, but at least the trend is in this direction.
Male, Italian, 42 years old
An Affection-Compensating Tool
As I spend most of my life in front of a computer monitor, I inevitably heard the news of Facebook and what its original task was: track down lost classmates.
The first person I found was G.P., the little genius in mathematics, the one who made me go from first grade to eighth grade without challenging my pathological need to copy. G.P. remained in the homeland, while I moved thirty years ago. Since then, I have not known anything about my teenage friends.
The first answers came to me on what happened, which was this or that, for the most part had offspring and divorced, others were less fortunate, struck down by cancer or HIV, everyone lost track of some others, and some others, with little surprise, died of an overdose.
This was the generation of 1963, the generation born and raised in the Stalingrad of Italy. The town where I was born saw Walter Alasia grow up and die in a gun battle in the mid-seventies with the police. Coincidentally, the house where he kept a gun under his bed was right in front of the technical institute I attended for just a year, enough time to understand that that place was definitely not for me. Then I tried to remember the name of “the most beautiful girl in school” and, with much effort, I succeeded in pulling out the name of the cute blonde girl who came into my nights to feed my wet dreams.
“Hello, do you remember me? I’m M.C.” “Yes,” she answered, and then I jumped into her photo archive and found very little of that blonde muse, the inspiration of my erections I hid between a mattress and the sheets.
In the first paragraph, I already said that I spend my time in front of a monitor, where I am now writing this. This has been my job since 1989. During more than twenty years, my abdominal turtle committed suicide, leaving room for a more sedentary sloth. In 2003, I was seized with a terrible pain at night that went from my head to left arm fingers. I thought I was going to die, and thought I was having a heart attack. Instead, a cervical disc had gotten out of place, a herniated disc. It was like I had held a sandbag on my head for twenty years. My head looking at the monitor, my seat at the window of the world, had made me sick. Mouse myalgia became seasonal like a sneeze, all diseases arising from this static wandering of the www.
Let’s go back to the main topic. Did I leave Facebook? Yes, I left it. Let’s say that I simulated a virtual suicide. I wrote goodbye forever and I left. I left because I considered my presence on FB inappropriate, it was like having in the workplace the possibility of not thinking about my true concerns, the true extent of my real commitments; being on FB had become dispersive.
At the same time, I fell in love and Facebook as an affection-compensating tool did not work anymore. It seemed to me that FB was just palliative for my loneliness—working at home alone all day, being too tired at night to go out, a sense of misanthropy increasingly acute—so goodbye FB, now I have a real life. Then, in too short a time my love story ended, and from there to my FB resurrection was too short a step. I did some cleaning, as mechanically relegating people I had met maybe twice in a lifetime as Friends seemed crazy, but I am not rude enough to take away the friendship; I obscured them, that’s all.
I think Facebook is nothing more than a cauldron of psychiatric and psychoanalytic outlets, allowing the need for consensus about what you think and say to be met, a bit like the zigulì tablets sold in pharmacies—colorful and sweet—but that did not contain even a minimal dose of vitamins—a placebo. Inside the container also are real friends, people I meet regularly, and FB keeps us in touch and allows us to set real appointments, saving on our phone bills. Honestly, I also made contacts that led to economic benefits, finding people with whom I worked before and went back to working with on projects.
Finally, I add that in my life I have met many people, but those I regard as most balanced and wise aren’t on Facebook.
Moreno Confalone, Male, Bergamo, Italy
Boring to Death
Interactions on Facebook bore me to death. I’m not interested in the sayings, jokes, or photos of the year, or the proverbs that appear daily. I have rarely seen deep or personal messages with content being sent to the all friends network.
I do not like “Fastbook”, because it is based on speed and superficiality. It is not for me and after a little while, I left it!
Silvia Passone, Female, Italy
Obsessive-Compulsive
Almost every site on the Internet seems to want your total involvement. They have many ways for keeping you on their site, but Facebook for sure has the best tricks. Facebook is the most addicting. Your friends are there, and friends of friends, and interesting strangers, then you have pictures, links, games, and applications. Little by little, as my number of friends and groups expanded, Facebook took more and more of my time. You can peek into the intimate lives of almost the whole world without feeling guilty.
I found myself behaving like an alcoholic who looks for every excuse to get his fix. When you are online too much, reading, commenting, and jumping from one thing to another, the mind becomes very restless. The more restless it is, the more bullshit it thinks. Like a junkie, I started to become a bit paranoid. I wanted to know if my friends were talking about me, or if they were excluding me from conversations. Needless to say, the anxious jumps from one profile to another in search of a connecting thread of my hypothesis confused my thoughts even more, and I just felt worse.
If you have a slight tendency to be obsessive-compulsive, Facebook expands this tendency to the maximum. After all, Facebook itself is the most obsessive-compulsive company. It accumulates and analyzes the data through state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technologies.
I want to exit Facebook but I am stuck there. Leaving my friends feels like I am dying. I invested too much time there and I would feel too lonely by leaving them. I am in the very first stage of a recovering alcoholic: acknowledging there’s a big problem but not knowing how to resolve it, just like the economy and politicians. The debt situation got too far, they did not acknowledge it in time, and suddenly they saw a big problem but nobody knew what to do. However, maybe that’s better than not even knowing there’s a problem.
Male, 26, France
From Village to Global Village
I spent three years in a poor African country working for a NGO just before the big Facebook explosion. In Africa where I was staying, the Internet was unreliable and slow. The electrical power wasn’t reliable as well. We used the Internet as a modern telegraph, sending just the important messages. Nobody used it to waste time on Facebook or for entertainment.
In Africa, everything is much more direct and intense. You are exposed to real problems and suffering everyday, not like something seen on YouTube and shared on Facebook. Human connections are also direct. I went to Africa when Facebook was one of the many social networks sites and I came back to my country discovering that almost everybody I knew was on Facebook. So I joined. I even set up a group connected to my job at the NGO, but when we set up meetings and invited hundreds of people, just few confirmed their attendance, and even fewer showed up.
In Africa, you do not miss a gathering. Everybody knows about it and everybody does his or her best to attend. Through Facebook, we can send a message to hundreds of people in a matter of seconds but we don’t know how many are actually going to read it and with what level of attention or motivation.
In the villages, you communicate either personally or at most by phone. In both cases, you get the full attention of the person and the chances are greater that the conversation will lead to real action. My Facebook activism clashed over a thick wall of indifference. I closed my Facebook accounts and now I call people directly or just send them emails.
Male, North European, 27
Reliving my Earlier Nightmares
What for most people is the best feature of Facebook—rediscovering old friends—has been my nightmare. I had a difficult teenage period. When I was in high school, my parents divorced and I was left alone with my mother and younger sister. At that time, my father didn’t support us much, even though he didn’t lack money. My mother became depressed. My friends were my way to escape from the hard reality of my everyday life.
When I was 17, I had a boyfriend from school. We enjoyed partying and drinking. And, as many teenagers do, we did some stupid things. One night, I went to my boyfriend’s house and we had fun by shooting sex pictures. It was very exciting to create sexy poses and see myself as an attractive girl. At the time, being sexually attractive was a way for me to get love and I think was compensation for my difficult family situation.
Then, as often happens with teenagers’ “eternal” love, our love story finished in turmoil. I left him after discovering that he had another girl, and then another one. But he couldn’t accept that I was leaving him, mostly because his pride as a playboy was hurt. So he became bitter and talked badly about me with every friend, telling them that I was a bitch and even showing them the pictures he took. I became the news of the day. Needless to say, I was extremely ashamed. From that moment on, both my home and my school environments became a nightmare.
As soon as I finished high school, I moved to another town and got a job, and I attended school to improve my job position. I left my old life and started a new one. In the meanwhile, many people were using Facebook and I signed up. An old friend from high school asked for my friendship. In the beginning I was reluctant, but I accepted her, only to discover that her list of friends included the boys and girls who teased me and made my life miserable. Actually, I did not want to see them anymore, not even on Facebook.
They all saw that I became friends with my old friend, and then some of them asked for my friendship. Two of them even sent a couple of nasty messages to me when I did not accept. One asked for my friendship under a different name just to write offensive messages on my wall, which I deleted. For a while, I again experienced the stress I had felt when I was 17 and was the laughing stock of the school. After that Facebook experience, I carefully selected new friends and set the complicated privacy settings in safer ways. But even this doesn’t make you safe from being exposed to the world by somebody who wants to hurt you.
When I just wanted to leave my past without any trace, Facebook created a way to reach any person on this world, reminding them about their past even though they may just want to forget it and even though they had changed their life. In a way, they aren’t the same people they were before.
Since I had a lot of new friends and work contacts on Facebook, I couldn’t just delete my Facebook account. But I am hating this Facebook thing. I fear that some old asshole is going to pop up at any time. Being on Facebook sometimes seems like keeping the door to your home open in a neighborhood full of drug addicts.
Female, 23 years old, Mexico
Political Control
I am a young Middle Eastern male, a political activist fighting for my country’s freedom. I’m not that crazy to be on Facebook and to give the government the ability to know everything about me and my friends. I also use email with much caution, often using temporary email addresses and Tor for browsing.
If we talk about technology, governments are always going to win. They can control your email accounts, they can stop your Internet access, and they can even use agents to pose as friends on social networks. If you are serious about social activism, you do the real thing, not the armchair one.
Male, 21, Middle Eastern
Not a Broad Communication
After the initial stages of my Facebook participation, when I was giving my opinion on current events, social events, and more, I realized that conveying these ideas only to people who more or less shared my opinion did not give me the opportunity to communicate my ideas in a broader way. I felt like I was writing a diary that people could read, but that they most probably did not even read, while all of my “friends” only wanted to disclose their events rather than participate in others’ events.
Since this did not satisfy me, I slowed my participation in Facebook. I just peek from time to time to see what’s happening.
Angela Urzi’, Female, Italy
You Always Have to Feed the Beast
I stopped using Facebook because I found that at the end of my Facebook “sessions” (after hours!) I had not accomplished anything and felt worse. I was reading, answering, chatting, or playing games and jumping from profile to profile, looking into other people’s lives to see who was getting along with whom. Then, at logout time, a felt huge sense of emptiness. My fingers wanted to be on the computer keyboard again, “just before sleeping, just to see if anybody wrote anything or if this or that are online,” quickly typing replies and anxiously waiting for others to reply. If friends ignored my messages, I felt emptiness, but when people replied I got excited. But every note on Facebook is short lived, so the emptiness was always lurking. You always have to feed the beast.
Female, Israel, 31 years old
A Narrowed Down Tunnel-Vision Style of Contact
I wanted to share with you why I left Facebook over a year ago and don't plan on returning. It all starts with how sites like Facebook affect our attitudes towards each other and particularly our attitudes towards ourselves. You see, I had a growing fear that this entire generation was being lead in a direction towards extreme narcissism and superficiality.
The way we communicate through Facebook is a narrowed down tunnel-vision style of contact that leaves room for inaccurate assumptions, guesswork, and passive hostility. I decided to grab my parachute and jump off of that plane to pursue a life free of digital constrictions and regain genuine social contact with people that are important in my life through the use of phone calls and face to face contact. The number of self-centered people that can be found on sites like Facebook was disturbing to say the least and sent chills up my spine.
I'd rather not live my social life through a computer screen. The most important people in my life were quickly found out and the ones that didn't matter are now clearly evident. I now retain lasting friendships with people that I meet on a regular basis - the way real friendships should work. It really was a healthy decision for me and while I can't speak on behalf of everyone, I know that many people spend hours of their days writing to no one in particular about things in their life that don't truly matter to anyone, all in search of a 'like' or comment.
This 'look at me' lifestyle will truly be the downfall of their mental health, but all I can do is hope that they realize where they're going and take steps to improve their life. My name is Ben, and I'm happily Facebook free. :)
Ben, 24, California
Ivo Quartiroli is also the author of The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet
“It isn't easy to find an informed and critical look at the impact of digital media practices on human lives and minds. Ivo Quartiroli offers an informed critique based in both an understanding of technology and of human consciousness.” —Howard Rheingold
“Aware of the profound and rapid psychological and social metamorphosis we are going through as we ‘go digital’ without paying attention, Ivo Quartiroli is telling us very precisely what we are gaining and what we are losing of the qualities and privileges that, glued as we are to one screen or another, we take for granted in our emotional, cognitive and spiritual life. This book is a wake-up call. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates should read it.” —Derrick de Kerckhove
It is nearly half a century since Marshall McLuhan pointed out that the medium is the message. In the interim, digital technologies have found an irresistible hook on our minds. With the soul’s quest for the infinite usurped by the ego’s desire for unlimited power, the Internet and social media have stepped in to fill our deepest needs for communication, knowledge and creativity – even intimacy and sexuality. Without being grounded in those human qualities which are established through experience and inner exploration, we are vulnerable to being seduced into outsourcing our minds and our fragile identities.
Intersecting media studies, psychology and spirituality, The Digitally Divided Self exposes the nature of the malleable mind and explores the religious and philosophical influences which leave it obsessed with the incessant flow of information.
The Table of Contents, the introduction and the first chapter are available here
References
Balezon, Emily, “Why Facebook Is After Your Kids,” New York Times, 25 Oct 2011
Cubrilovic, Nik. “Logging out of Facebook is not enough”. 25 Sep 2011. <http://nikcub.appspot.com/logging-out-of-facebook-is-not-enough>
Espinoza, Guadalupe and Juvonen, Jaana. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. December 2011, 14(12): 705-709. doi:10.1089/cyber.2010.0492.
Pew Internet, “Teens, kindness and cruelty on social network sites”, Nov 2011: <http://www.pewinternet.org/Press-Releases/2011/Teens-and-social-media.aspx>
Pollet, Thomas V., Sam G.B. Roberts, Robin I.M. Dunbar. “Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking,” April 2011, 14(4): 253-258. doi:10.1089/cyber.2010.0161: <http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cyber.2010.0161>
Winer, Dave. “Facebook is Scaring Me,” Sep 2011, <http://scripting.com/stories/2011/09/24/facebookIsScaringMe.html>
Zimmerman, F., “Children’s Media Use and Sleep Problems: Issues and Unanswered Questions,” Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, June 2008.