The Lonely Facebook Struggle

I use Facebook as a connection to family that I don’t see on a regular basis, old friends from high school and group projects. A while ago, I tried to deactivate my Facebook and Twitter account just to see how many people would actually even notice. I was trying for a month, but unfortunately could only make it to 2 weeks for Facebook and 3 weeks for Twitter because of a group that I am involved with on campus. Our main communication is through a Facebook group with frequent updates on Twitter, so I had no other choice but to reactivate them. As soon as I reactivated Facebook, I get about 6 messages from friends. Out of those 6 messages, 3 of them were related to the group that I am in about schedules. 2 were “friends” needing certain things to get their homework done. The other message was from my younger brother away in basic, saying that he wasn’t able to reach me by phone. None of those people bothered to call or even shoot a text besides my brother, so did they really even care? I think not. Facebook is a lonely mess, but so is real life.

The other side of the Facebook struggle, making it a full circle of loneliness, and another reason to deactivate it, are the apps. They are extremely crazy with the various recreations of life that you can live virtually. I haven’t played any of those sorts but I have recently been occupied with Bitstrips, and it is very time consuming. I don’t worry about social things as much, because I am either spending hours making Bitstrips just right or reading through Tumblr. I just so happened to look over to the other apps being advertised, and there are apps from baby adopter to virtual families and even to apps for friends. So even if you don’t talk to any of your “Fakebook” friends, you are able to entertain yourself with apps that can fill in the gaps of your life.

Both of these brief topics relate to the article by Stephen Marche, Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? The article talks about loneliness being a public health issue with negative outcomes throughout life. I know that I can say that the 2 weeks I went without social media were probably the healthiest. I gave coworkers the chance of friendship, which is great now. I didn’t bother to look them up on Facebook because the face to face conversations are nice and I also did not want to turn them into “Fakebook” friends. I think if it were possible to communicate to the people I need without having Facebook as the connection, I would deactivate Facebook in a heartbeat and keep it that way. (It would also help if Facebook wasn’t tempting and having the easy process of just logging back in and BOOM, reactivated).