Please release me

Facebook is evil. A couple of friends encouraged me to sign up, and I succumbed. I hadn’t realised it’s a pyramid scheme that trades in your social credibility, at the price of your friendships. If you don’t want to look like a total loser, you have to encourage all your friends to sign up, so you have loads of friends on your homepage. Then they don’t want to look like losers so they have to sign up all their friends. And so on.

Once your homepage is packed with buddies, albeit ones now silently cursing you for infecting them with the Facebook virus, you have to live out your social life in public, ‘poking’ other people and having them ‘write on your wall’. If you want to arrange to see someone over the weekend, you log in, write on their wall, get an e-mail saying they’ve replied, log back in, see what they’ve written on your wall, click through to write on their wall, and before you know it it’s Monday and you haven’t actually met up. Why not just e-mail them direct? Or call? I never thought of myself as a Luddite. But when technology seems to add to the hassle and time of getting things done, rather than making it easier, you can count me out. I closed down my Facebook account last week. And I’ve never felt freer.