A Facebook-shaped Hole

So I’m still off Facebook. But I am feeling the loss of community a bit.

desolation

I decided to stop using Facebook in a personal capacity a couple of weeks ago. I have various pages on there that I didn’t want to lose access to, so instead of deleting my account, I just unfriended everyone except my wife (I want to see what she posts about me!).

I haven’t missed it all that much, but have noticed a few things:

  1. I still log in at least once a day, even though I know there will be nothing new in my news feed
  2. I’ve started using Twitter as a substitute, and have started to understand it better as a result
  3. I only really missed it once, when I wanted to post a video I made with my granddaughter (see below) and realized that I didn’t really have anywhere comparable to Facebook to do that

Twitter is interesting, but very different to Facebook. I still don’t really understand it 🙂

Here’s that video too:

Facebook

So long, and thanks for all the likes

facebook broken

This isn’t the first time I have walked away from Facebook, or at least tried to. Unlike this essay, I don’t think the internet is the best place to live your life.

There is a lot to like (ha ha) about Facebook. It does provide a community, something that is particularly important here in Japan as it can get lonely otherwise. It allows you to keep up with people that you don’t see often and probably wouldn’t think to call or email.

In its pure form, I would probably have kept my account. However, Facebook has made a number of important changes recently that really degraded the experience for me:

  • not showing all my friends’ posts
  • not showing things in chronological order and bringing posts back to the top every time someone likes or comments on them
  • showing things my friends like or comment on
  • showing ads that have some tenuous link to a friend
  • not showing all posts from pages or communities
  • not sending posts from pages to more than 10% of the community without payment
  • co-operating with the NSA
  • the new microphone listen function on phones

Facebook is also a time-suck, and was starting to get in the way of things I would rather be working on. At the end of the day I get much more pleasure out of writing something on this blog, or an article, or reading a book, or meeting someone for coffee than by hanging out on Facebook.

I’m going to keep my account for now (for the pages) but I have unfriended everyone except my wife and don’t plan to use the account in a personal capacity again. We’ll see how long I last this time 😉

How about you? How do you view your Facebook usage?

Graded Reader Word Counts

facebook

Right, this is the third and final post (for now) about graded readers and word counts. From now on, I will be posting about this issue only at the Facebook page I have set up to co-ordinate the various proposed campaigns.

http://www.facebook.com/GradedReaderWordCounts

I think as well as the boycott, it would be useful to encourage teachers to write to publishers directly, as well as create some educational resources aimed at informing publishers about the issue.

Thanks for all the support and suggestions so far, and hopefully see you on Facebook!

 
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