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I recently left Facebook for good.  I haven't been on too long (maybe a year or two) and I was never very good at it.  And leaving right now, at a time when everyone seems to be celebrating social networks of various kinds and the glorious democratic ethos that Facebook exemplifies, seems even to me a little churlish and backward.  Maybe this is just a retrogressive impulse (I get them every so often) -- something anti-social (I've never understood the negative connotations that the word "cloistered" seems to evoke in my friends) and anti-democratic -- but as I've thought about the reasons for my decision, I've come up with two explanations, one fairly ordinary and the other perhaps personal to me.  The ordinary one is that I am growing increasingly uncomfortable with on-line and other forums in which I and my personal information is not private.  The more personal reason is that I think Facebook and similar networks artificially disturb the important workings and value of memory. 

I won't spend much time talking about the first reason.  It's probably true that I use many other of these networks where I've shared my personal information.  So it's probably too late to be as private as I'd like anyway.  But I read somewhere that disclosing your birthday is especially bad, and I had done that on Facebook -- and I had the kneejerk dread right at that moment that my life was generally too public as respects personal information about me and my family. 

But as I thought about why I wanted to leave, it seemed to me that the more important reason was that I've always been somewhat uncomfortable with resurrecting friendships and acquaintances from the past.  I love my memories of old friends, and of course I feel very grateful for them.  In addition to their good taste in befriending and acquainting me, I think they are overall a nice group. 

But an important part of what I cherish about them is the memory of who they were and what they represented to me at a particular time and place in my life.  I like them in some sense frozen in amber in my mind -- static, not dynamic, paintings in my memory.  Of course I recognize that in reality they will have changed in all kinds of ways, just as I have.  But it is the memory of the way that they were, not the way that they are now, which I find meaningful and worthwhile, a source of pleasure to think on from time to time.

Facebook distorts the natural processes, and the pleasures, of memory.  One of Facebook's basic reasons for being is to reconnect you to old friends and acquantances, and in the process, connect you with the new friends and acquaintances that your old friends and acquaintances made while you were occupied with other affairs.  But I don't know those new people, and I don't recognize (and more importantly, I often don't want to recognize) why my old friends made those friends.  And that disrupts what I think about my old friends.  It alters my memories. 

And in fact, I deserve my memory to be disrupted, because I couldn't let well enough alone and enjoy my memories.  No, I needed to go  rooting around after what those old friends are doing now -- how many children they've got, whether they've had 3 divorces or 5 affairs in the years since I knew them, what bands they are listening to, what cool new sneakers they bought -- because I thought, 'Hey, wouldn't it be great if I could reconnect with my old friends and we could just, you know, keep it going!'

[Footnote.  I have never understood why my friends and acquaintances send me pictures of their children at Christmas time.  Again, I don't know any of those people.  I suppose people think that their children are cute.  I tend to think that about my own child.  But the reality is that most children are average looking, and if I really wanted to see cute children, I could spend the holidays looking at clothing catalogs.  But I'm not particularly interested in other people's children at all, cute or otherwise.  Still, I like to receive tokens of remembrance during the season, and I guess pictures of children is better than being forgotten completely.]  

Now, one might say that Facebook doesn't do these terrible things at all.  In the first place, you can always refuse to friend someone.  I suppose that's true, but that doesn't seem to me to be much in keeping with the Facebook geist.  After all, I could have refused to be someone's friend just by sipping my cognac here in my study, in splendid isolation with nothing but my memory and a cigar to stimulate it.  Or, someone might say, what's wrong with making new memories?  That might be true too, but the reality is that my friendships with many people were special and meaningful just exactly because they were largely uncontrolled by me, and contingent on a large set of variables that I cannot replicate now -- indeed, that I should not want to replicate for the sake of "keeping it going."  "It" will end; better that it should end in its time and manner, rather than be manipulated to live on preternaturally. 

At all events, I hope that this somewhat antisocial rumination hasn't spoiled my guest stint here at Prawfs from the get-go.  Thanks for having me, and here's to making some memories.

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