Goodbye FaceBook

A brief explanation for my having left Facebook, in case anyone even noticed. Actually, I haven't really left. I deactivated my page and created another hidden from everyone for one reason. I administrate another FaceBook page for a local organization and to continue administrating that page required that I continue to have a personal FaceBook page. It did not require that my personal page be public, only that it exist.

So, why did I abandon my public page? Good question. FaceBook is a tremendously popular medium for communication between friends, family and especially people you might not hear from at all if it didn't exist.

But I came to believe it also to be addictive and that it has contributed to an unhealthy freedom for folks to speak in ways they would never were they face to face with many of those who read some of their remarks. A lack of awareness of boundaries, of space seems to have disappeared too often in the world and is never more obvious sometimes than in the comments and postings on FaceBook.

Many of my FaceBook friends were students or former students from my elementary school, some as young as 10 years old. It was important to me, as a teacher, to keep the content and discourse on my page civil and safe for those children I knew were watching. Despite my occasional pleas on my page to please think of the children, too often I would discover entries I would need to hide and the habits of some even necessitated I unfriend them.

The last straw was when a "friend" I had asked not to use inappropriate language on my page continued to and I was forced to unfriend him, he began a series of abusive messages which were rude, mean and foul. He was angry that I was attempting to censor people, an accusation that, as far as the content on my page was concerned, was absolutely true. But even more important I was trying to encourage a civil discourse. I did not respond to his venomous comments but they continued. I reported his abuses to the FaceBook authorities but I had had enough.

It was a combination of things really. Everything I have mentioned above plus my concern that I just spent too much time on the site and began to realize that all that time kept me from being more active in other ways arguably more productive. So, the decision.

I am very concerned that some friends, including those I had actually re-discovered on FaceBook, might disappear from my life again. I am not quite sure what to do about that yet. E-mail and the telephone are certainly options. I am encouraging that. I don't know what I'll do exactly yet but I know that reactivating my old account just isn't an option.