This was a significant moment for me. You see, I haven’t logged in to Facebook at all this year.
When I tell friends that I don’t have a Facebook, their eyes widen. Then they gush support for my decision. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking I should do that too,” they say. “It takes up so much time!”
I didn’t deactivate my account because I felt like I wasn’t productive enough, though. By first semester freshman year, I was already a monstrously efficient user of the medium. There were the lingering ties from high school, and I was forming new attachments by the day at Princeton. I’d block out a half-hour to answer 20 wall posts at a time and maybe ‘poke’ a few friends for whom I had fewer words but just as much affection.
Last semester, Facebook suggested that I add someone as a friend. It was a fascinating boy I had met at a book reading. I knew from the beginning we were destined for Facebook friendship and then, to have the validation of Facebook’s suggestion! It derailed an entire evening that I should have spent thinking about the affect of the transcontinental railroad on perceptions of gender and race in 19th-century America. Instead, I spent the evening very much in the 21st century, perceiving the opposite gender through as many portals as his privacy settings would allow.
At the end of all my browsing, I found that I had borne witness to his last three years of college — his partying, his studying, a late-night trip to the climbing gym, plus some family vacations. Further clicking morphed him back into a thinner, darker version of himself in high school. I clicked until I reached the photos of his Facebook profile infancy and he would grow no younger. Then, with an idle twitch of my fingers and eyeballs, I moved on to our mutual friends.
By the end of the evening, I was unsettled and drained. It takes energy to follow the contours of someone’s life and keep track of their face in the swarm of friends and family. With the live aggregation of updates on the mini-feed of the home page, I didn’t even need to seek out people’s profiles to take in far more than I ought to.
Learning about evolutions in my friends’ wardrobes, in the shapes of their faces, in the company they keep — these discoveries are delightful in their minute relevance. Usually, only those who care the most will ever uncover those details. It’s the way we reassure ourselves that we are truly in tune with each another. But where is that reassurance when there is no friendship, no relationship whatsoever, for this discovery process to inform? No wonder I felt so empty after my stalking.
Then, I contemplated my own Facebook photo albums, and I realized with horror that what partly motivated my posting was the empty aspiration to be the object of someone else’s voyeurism, to inform the lives of others with the same sort of tiny intrusions I allowed into mine when I accessed my Facebook. I deactivated my profile soon afterward.
Deactivation aside, I’m no Luddite. I think Facebook is truly useful for some things. Now, without the daily reminders, I’m forgetful of my friend’s birthdays, and sometimes I miss a party invite. And occasionally, I feel like I’m missing something else, too. There are some serendipitous encounters that really can only be mediated through the internet.
I remember once cracking open my computer and seeing my Facebook newsfeed filled with the faces of people at home in Salt Lake City, all with near-identical status updates: “It’s raining!” they exclaimed. No one loves the rain more than kids from Salt Lake City. We live in a desert basin, and when rainstorms come, they release a fresh smell that lingers in air that is turned soft and moist. I remembered how the rain cast a beautiful, dark clarity upon the normally dusty landscape at home, and I thrilled that this moment of collective wonder was caught on Facebook. But, like all moments on Facebook, it was updated, and that instant of online acclamation soon gave way to status updates and wall postings that were less wonderful.
In the end, leaving Facebook wasn’t about the time wasted. There were sometimes bright and useful moments, but these were overwhelmed by a crush of mundanity that approximated the intimate day-to-day chatter of best friendship without the friendship to make that chatter meaningful.
After two days, my friend in St. Louis decided he wanted his profile back. He needed to know when an extra-credit session for his pharmacology class was. I was happy to relinquish access. As far as I’m concerned, he can keep his profile.
Sophie Jin is a Wilson School major from Salt Lake City, Utah. She can be reached at sjin@princeton.edu.
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