Why I Got Unplugged

We are back from a glorious two-week vacation at the Cape,  Our rental house overlooked a secluded, picturesque pond.  It was also just a few minute's drive to one of a half-dozen salt water beaches in Falmouth.  It was a quiet and relaxing location.  The  sound track was mainly honking waterfowl, squealing kids, jumping off the raft and the swish of wind in the trees.  No sirens, passing trains or idling diesel engines to disturb the serenity.  We swam, fished, read our books, floated our boat (ok it was a rubber raft) and spent a lot of time just looking at the water.

On the drive home the conversation turned to how pleasant it was to be unplugged.  Although we had wifi access to the internet, the clunky 10 year old laptop was so slow that we were not enticed to be constantly checking emails and Facebook as we normally would. Our phones were somewhere upstairs, not on the table in front of us.  In truth we were not totally disconnected. We had uploaded a few photos of us, savoring boiled lobsters and enjoying the ocean beach.

It is de rigueur, don't you know, to post smiling evidence of a life well-lived on social media.  No doubt our FB friends felt envy for us and our fabulous lives.

It's a seductive idea: to imagine that other people are as fascinated by our lives as we are. So, we post cute kid and pet photos, vacation pics of us standing in front of churches and mountains, or check-in at the restaurant/concert/amusement park, so those back home can share our joy, and, hopefully, wallow in envy.  Yes, the dark side of FB is that it enables our innate desire to brag about our experiences, in hopes that others will find our lives interesting and enviable.  

We copy links from others' that either amuse us, raise our hackles, or -- worse -- carry some innocuous message of hope and good will.  We signal our virtue by sharing any message that demonstrates how morally superior we are.  

I wondered if I would be missing anything if I never went back to FB.

By the time we returned home, I had decided to opt out of Facebook and Twitter.  I confess that I'd been a regular reader and poster on both of these sites.  But I've been increasingly annoyed by the irrelevant information I had to plow through in order to find some content that was  A) interesting or B) informative or C) amusing.

My so-called "news feed" was cluttered with posts from people I did not know or care about, or blurry cell phone videos of amazing oddities or stupid quizzes or... need I go on?  Most of it was chaff.  It wasn't floating my boat.

Now, I know what you are thinking: Doesn't  Facebook have a way of managing your "feed" so that you only see posts from people you want to see?    Well, it is true that you can "block" a person who regularly posts annoying pictures or stupid jokes.
So, you say, what's your problem?  You can un-friend or block anyone who annoys or offends you.     Well, the problem is that Facebook does not give the user a way of filtering-out Friends' activities without blocking the friends' posts.  If one of your friends clicks "like" on some stranger's post, that post appears in your feed.  If one of your friends comments on another's post, that shows-up in your feed, too.

So your news feed is cluttered by all manner of irrelevant posts that are braggy, boring, lame, and uninteresting.

Here is my last post.  They call it an epitaph:

After being virtually 'unplugged' from social media for two weeks, I've concluded that I am not interested, informed or entertained by 95% of the content on Facebook.  Therefore,  I am giving 24 hours notice that I will be leaving FB.  Please be assured that I am not de-friending you, I am de-friending myself.  Please note that I can still be reached by phone or email if you have news that I need to know.  

I am free at last.