Goodbye Facebook.

For all of you wondering "Can I really give up Facebook?" the answer is an emphatic "Of course, stupid." You got along fine before it existed and you'll forget about it once you're not refreshing your feed every 10 minutes.

The other day someone sent me an e-mail or text (I forget) to invite me to an event. They knew I had abandoned Facebook and wanted to make sure I was included. I felt slightly honored that they would go "out of their way" to include me, and it was much more meaningful than the average Facebook invite-all event listing.

Have you ever met someone you hadn't seen in a while, and they ask you what you've been doing, and you get a plethora of different reactions as you explain the ups and downs of your recent adventures? You don't get that if they're on Facebook. Human interaction is based on communication, and Facebook is not communication. It's the Reader's Digest version of The Truman Show.

Maybe I am a luddite. But what i'm fighting against is the replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology. Maybe someday soon, Google Glass will become so ubiquitous that we'll all watch snippets of other people's lives instead of status updates, and we'll never have to live life on our own again; we'll just live through someone else.

Farmville could be blocked relatively easily. These can't be blocked at all.

I think it's a "tired argument" because its not easily defeated. _Why_ wouldn't you "usually" e-mail or call? Why? Why would you? (This seems like Churchill's point: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.") E-mail didn't fail, this is why we're seeing a resurgence of it (http://three.sentenc.es/, 501 developers against e-mail bombardment, minimalism over e-mail organization, etc.). Why has FB suddenly become "the best we've got" when all people seem to argue for is particular features that could be replaced. FB is a mash-up; this has nothing to do with "maintainability of social grace." It's a mash-up; and consumers like mash-ups.

Seriously: _Why?_ Why do we need we need a "social framework" that captures the rest of our human-interaction? We do we need a "social baseline"? Why do we need a system to maintain familiarity for us? I'm not even sure I understand the value of the point you've made, even if it is a good argument. _I_ maintain familiarity; Facebook is a tool for supporting what I do naturally.

> It maintains familiarity.

I'm not sure what this means. How does it do this? By making an API function do... What?

> Subbed in a co-ed game of ultimate frisbee and met some people? Add them on Facebook.

Add their e-mails? Organize your labels.

The sweet spot for _who_? I'm telling others to drop it because you can achieve those goals through other interfaces; you're telling me that others shouldn't set their goals too high (acquaintances). My point still stands. E-mail [certainly] would make more sense within the "acquaintances" counterpoint.

Facebook is a set of opinions as to how one should manage (or maintain?) one's social life. Isn't it clear that if one rejects that System, one might be expected to provide an alternative, or possibly simpler, solution? The argument cannot really be a surprise to you, surely.

[EDIT:] I'm _struggling_ to understand the point about "maintaining" familiarity. I really do wish to understand it, as I feel it touches the heart of the matter. However, such an idea may require a break-down.

I think the issue of "discovery" is an important one, but what actually am I discovering in this digital world? A portfolio? Or a person? To argue that FB's sweet spot is about acquaintances from the evidence that it's a good tallying tool, or a notes tool, for friends made in the physical social world, I think, is a bad argument, or at least it's not very compelling. I think such an argument only re-confirms the "tired argument" I initially presented.

Any bit of information can make an emotional impact, if it's meaningful to you. Maybe you learned that your whole family burned alive via morse code. Doesn't really matter how you got the information, you got it. And you'll probably have an emotional response. That isn't what i'm talking about at all.

I said replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology. It's the removal of the human element that troubles me. When people stop reaching out to one another, and instead reach out to a plastic widget. When instead of sharing, laughing, and crying together, we take, laugh, and cry in a room, alone, our thumbs and index fingers hurriedly punching out comments on data streams, missing vital clues and skipping over the common human courtesies we learn and use in the course of physical interaction. Facebook is stripping away our humanity.

The simplest example is the occasional comment-box-flame-war you'll see when someone posts something about race, religion, sex, politics, etc. Total strangers haranguing your friends because they decided your status update's comment box was a nice place to have a pointless argument. It's made worse by the vagueries of the internet and the invincibility of the internet.

Email and text don't work the same way, and aren't a threat to human interaction in the way Facebook is. Twitter is similar, though, which is why I also deleted Twitter.

So, you're at an ultimate frisbee game. Everyone introduces themselves. You can then go home and find them on Facebook based on their name and mutual friends (since you probably know some other people on the team). No asking for contact info and all the associated social baggage. There's one benefit.

Now, once you're friends with them, Facebook passively (or actively, with minor communication such as comments) maintains familiarity. Basically what this means is if you happen to run into them six months later, it isn't like meeting them for the first time. Facebook can by no means fully maintain this sort of low-level relationship indefinitely. However, I've found it's very effective at increasing the half-life of such things.

Facebook automates the maintenance of my social network. That is valuable.