Yeah, and I will make this an entry in English.
It's been now three days since I left facebook. It wasn't an easy move, I remember thinking of doing this as far back as 2014, so four years on I finally did it. The great thing about it was that the idea flashed into my mind on Friday morning and I just took my phone and disconnected my account. I was doing a bit of writing to sort some thoughts out about why I was feeling a bit lonely the last few days, then I thought that watching facebook news was not really helping. Then I did it.
They way I did it, so quickly and without reading much about how to do it, gathering my data and so on I think I can still have it back and I am sure they still hold all my data but to be honest I don't really care that much about that. For me the most important thing was to get out of the addiction. And to me it was a temporary thing to last at least for the time I am in Bali. Yes I am in Bali.
I will post on that one of these days, today I will just revell at the thought of having started to take a bit more ownership of my online life and possibly regaining a lot of time that was wasted scrolling down the newsfeed.
A great Guardian article cheering up people who delete their accounts:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/27/pioneer-delete-facebook-addiction-social-life
Oh, I should say that my decision must have been inspired at least partly by the decision by a friend of mine who deleted his account only a few days before I did, so I am thankful to him too.
Things that I hope to achieve with this daring move:
i) Save time as I said earlier. Lots of time wasted reading lots of useless information. More on this below
ii) Take control of my life online. Going into facebook had become such an automatic thing for me that even three days after I deleted my account I find myself clicking the facebook app button when my mind flies away. More on addiction and automatisms in the Guardian article
iii) Be more critical and open minded. One thing the article mentions is how due to the partisan way the logarithms bring you the news you like, you (and the rest of the population) tend to become more polarised, intolerant and ultimately alienated.
iv) Explore, experiment, see what happens. I think not being in facebook would certainly force me to make more real contact with people and base relationships on face to face contact and that's something I look forward too. It will help that after some years of traveling globally I plan to spend some months at my home town.
Also I recognize that I can still benefit from friends and colleagues being on facebook and promoting their work which is also my work and therefore I still benefit from facebook but I would be OK if they came out of facebook too. I think by now I have built a sufficiently strong and large network of friends whom I can contact by diverse means, and I trust my work can live by itself outside the social networks. These last words might sound like hubris and getting off the net like a bit of a luxury but I won't indulge in self-beating for doing this. I am excited.
Let's see how long it lasts, it might be hours, it might be days, it might be forever.
