Saying Goodbye to Facebook: Debrief with a note of Network Theory

The idea has triggered every user…

How would my life change if I were to leave Facebook?

A simple yet returning question for many of us. While the share of cons has been widely evoked, from scientific papers to episodes of Black Mirror, one can hardly disregard the pros of the social platform. So much so that in most conversations that I hear between friends contemplating the idea, a few major arguments tend to repeat themselves. I want to try and address them and reflect how they affected me in practice.

Implications: Online vs. Offline

Although these terms sound like the lyrics of an overplayed summer hit on the radio that you can’t escape, it’s important to make a distinction between online and offline effects. Since we’re talking about a digital platform, the most evident ones are online. But the consequences are sometimes inevitably offline too.

Online

By deciding the leave the network, you decide to give up on the platform and the online communication that it enables you to be involved in. You must say goodbye to the embellished window into your friends’ lives, their personal updates, their birthdays, the events happening around, the few conflictive conversations that have not been avoided by the filter bubble that Facebook’s algorithm enforced in your newsfeed. And while deciding what information you might most be interested in seeing, Facebook analyzes the relationships that you have with them. How often do you talk? Is the tone more personal or professional? Are you more or less emotional? These things can be determined through some automated text analysis, or text mining applied to a large scale of data. Based on these techniques, Facebook understands if your friends are close or distant, strong ties or weak ties.

Interpersonal ties

While you might indeed miss out on some juicy conversations with your close friends and eventually some interesting gossip from the groups you’re active, the strongest impact of leaving Facebook will be on what social media theorists call weak ties. Network theorist Mark Granovetter, who is widely considered as a pioneer of the field, shares a dichotomous view of one’s acquaintances where some people are classified as strong ties (hear good friends) or weak ties (distant friends). While there is reason to criticize dichotomies for their oversimplification of complex social stimuli, it seems intuitive to follow the base of Granovetter’s assumptions. Who hasn’t, thanks to Facebook, remembered that friends A, B and C had a birthday coming up. And wait, who was B again? Did I meet C at A’s birthday? How did I end up there in the first place? It could be that when I was still in high school, I once went to this event with B and decided to keep in touch through this intriguing new web platform branding itself as a social network. These are weak ties, and clearly, they do not represent the majority of one’s interactions online.

Another good example is Linkedin. Amongst the multitude of very talented people who seem to be ever more qualified due to nice tricks in the phrasing of their respective experience, there are a lot of weak ties who “might someday become useful if my professional career goes in that direction”. Well I believe that this is how many of us might reason. And I personally find this argument valid. I wondered how the loss of my weak ties on Facebook might be too much of a burden.

Offline

Events

In the ever-connected world, it is vital for most of us to make sure that we participate in the community gatherings that showcase our interests. While discussing the potential departure from the platform with friends, we usually arrive at a conclusion around these lines: “I don’t know how I would stay up to date with my events. I enjoy being notified about the things I care about that are happening nearby”. While the form might vary, the message is clear: Facebook has successfully become the go-to platform for offline things to do. So much so that you might find it challenging to stay alert about your favorite concerts without it. And even so, how will you remember Sally’s birthday? Will Mike forget to invite you for his barbecue if Facebook doesn’t gently remind him that you’re a good friend by popping up your name high in the list of “suggested friends” that he should focus on inviting? This has been a serious challenge for me once I left the platform. All of a sudden I was in the dark. The closest replacement I could find has been the Spotify concerts near you tab that occasionally show when an artist has a concert planned in the city you select, although this is not always very well fed. I think that many smaller artists have chosen to feed their Tour dates on Facebook primarily because, well, it makes sense. That’s indeed where they get the most exposure, the most direct impact. And then of course, the people who will find those events will find it easy to share with their friends, in increasingly simplified and intrusive ways, via messenger.

My experience having left

Despite this presumably isolating situation I’ve entered, I managed to remain aware of what truly mattered. Mostly because the people surrounding me are still using Facebook and as strong ties, they are targeted in similar ways as I used to and therefore getting exposed to similar events I would myself have been presented with. Keeping in touch offline therefore mostly compensates for the loss of exposure to my targeted events.

Yet in retrospect I realize that I wasn’t able to achieve what I wanted in the first place, that is reducing the time I wasted “slacking off”. I wanted to reduce the numerous hours that I spent in the platform every week and reinvest that time into something of value for me. Yet what happened is mostly that I started spending more time on other similar websites like Twitter and Reddit. Overall, I am not replacing Facebook by doing something that brings direct improvement into my life but I spend time on platforms that more closely reflect my interests than my ties. I find Twitter more content oriented while Facebook is rather people oriented, just like Instagram. So despite not having healed a weakness that is the disease of our generation, I have at least channeled it into the directions that I found more meaningful to me, as an eternal lurker.