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So I killed my Facebook self

I died last night. Though traces of me still remain, and others will no doubt continue to address them as if I were still sentient, the shell that was once living is now very thoroughly dead. That’s right: I deactivated my Facebook account. The precise reason why requires a bit of history, so here goes:

In the beginning, Facebook differentiated itself from MySpace in a wide variety of ways; it restricted access to college students, it focused on communication with others rather than showing off yourself, it didn’t let you customize much about the structure of your profile, and it seemed mostly free of corporate meddling. It was these very things that accounted for its meteoric rise in popularity among people like me; college-bound, intellectual, internet-savvy, connected, and eager to meet people.

Something about Facebook felt classy and refined, while MySpace seemed brash and gaudy. Facebook was for the intellectuals; MySpace for football fans. If Facebook was college, then Myspace was high school, and symbolized everything those new college kids wanted to leave behind. That’s certainly a major part of why I joined; had the profile pages I looked at prior to joining been bedecked with tiled animated GIFs, green text on purple backgrounds, or began blaring gangsta rap, I would have stayed the hell away.

Facebook’s “vibe” was a classy one; you could declare your allegiance to Facebook with pride, all the while pooh-poohing the MySpace crowd you were glad you weren’t a part of.

Apple products are the same way, really. One of Apple’s most consistent success has been remaining cool and keeping its young hipster audience. Call them snobby and pretentious, but these people with their high discretionary incomes and wired, connected lifestyles are the folks marketers and advertisers go moist over. Facebook seemed like a goldmine because it was where these people had chosen to congregate online, and so in flowed the money in the ever-elusive quest to milk them for all they were worth.

And so naturally, soon that swanky hip vibe began to change. The problem with cultivating an arty intellectual wired subculture is of course that these people aren’t stupid; as soon as they sense they’re being taken for a ride and the me-toos appear, they hightail it outta there. In a series of stunning moves that seem designed to display that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s pimply-faced CEO had no idea what made his site popular to begin with, Facebook morphed. First it was just little things, like the addition of photo albums. Suddenly, your profile became a whole lot more about you. The attention-seekers posted hundreds and thousands of pictures of themselves and their friends engaging in more or less mundane activities, which began the subtle shift away from a focus on external communication and towards self-oriented introversion.

Then came the mini-feed, which eliminated the necessity of going and seeking out information on your friends activities–an active, extroverted exercise. Instead, the information came flowing to you while you waited around–a passive, introverted one. Suddenly, you didn’t have to do any work to find out what was going on; you could just use your profile as a hub of information and wait while other people did things you could react to.

Little wonder people began to call it “Stalkbook.” This subtle focus shift attracted a new generation of users: the MySpace people. They liked showing off, displaying their exploits, habits, and gold teeth; in short, they liked ostentation as opposed to subtlety and class. ((I honestly don’t mean to sound too snobby or elitist here, but this difference is an important one because it’s true; most personal MySpace pages are garish messes of selfish me-me-me focused dribble.))

And then it just snowballed from there. Applications allowed you to post what countries you’d visited, what Hogwarts house you’d have been sorted into, how green your habits were, whether you were a pirate or a ninja, and even allowed you to care for virtual pets. All this further pushed Facebook’s focus onto you, and made your profile a sort of hub for online life. It was your own personal Yahoo or Google homepage.

Only, that’s not why I signed up. I don’t have a personal homepage with one of those services, and I don’t want one. I don’t particularly care about posting my pictures online for the world to see, nor am I especially interested in maintaining a carefully-crafted online avatar.

Basically, Facebook stopped being about networking, and started being about showing off. And that’s when I quit. So goodbye Facebook, and good luck. I wish you the best, Mark Zuckerberg, as you begin to realize that you’ve alienated your oldest and most passionate users, and hope you manage to get out while the getting’s good, because as soon as the hungry sharks you’ve partnered with realize that that juicy audience they were lured to has flown the coop, it’s you they’ll be eating alive.

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