Skip to main content

Goodbye Facebook: why I'm stepping back

First of all, to be clear: I am not deleting my FB account, because I still find FB useful for marketplace and certain groups I'm part of. But other than that, I will be stepping back at the beginning of Lent, and plan on permanently minimising my use of Facebook - getting out of it what I need, but putting nothing in.


How this has come about

I have loved Facebook since 2007, because it has allowed me to easily stay up to date with what friends and family in distant lands are up to - and they're all over the place: the US, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Austria, ... it's the little things they post about life, that made me feel connected. It's not the same as a once-a-year Christmas update letter: not the highlights, but the nitty-gritty and their random thoughts and small life happenings. That is what has kept me on FB, really, when various friends have left over the past few years.

The other really useful FB feature I got into when the kids were born were the Facebook Groups. I hadn't used those prior to then, but once I had the kids I suddenly discovered local mothers' groups, support and information, and then groups about any and every interest I have. A tribe for every interest. I still love that about FB.

So those two things are the reasons I'm staying, why FB is still a useful tool for me. But it has its downsides. 

  • Ads: the ads are manifold and they are targeted. So targeted it's actually worrying sometimes. FB knows where I've been, what I've browsed and searched, even what I've talked about with my husband the evening before. This won't change by my minimising my FB use, of course, but at least I won't be engaging with those ads and buying things.
  • Likes: when I post something, I can't help but wonder who will see it, who will react to it, what they will say if they comment. And to put it simply: I don't want to give mental space to that any more. I love sharing our family life with friends and family far away, but...
  • Privacy: for the kids, mostly, rather than my own privacy - they are 6 and 4, and I have been increasingly cautious about safeguarding their privacy online. On FB, I created a secret group years ago which was the only place where I would post their faces and stories about them. That secret group was for friends and family by invitation only, so it couldn't be found or seen by anyone else. That was of course fine in terms of the wider public, but I just don't want to continue giving their (our) pictures to FB at all. They are a commercial company and we are the data; that is the deal, and I know it; and while it's not necessarily anything sinister, I prefer to minimise our engagement with it as far as it's possible.
  • Time: FB invests huge sums in finding ways to keep users scrolling, keep them on their site for longer, occupy and own their time and attention. I'm not immune to their techniques, even though I do recognise them - and that irritates me no end. 
You might ask, but what about this blog? Isn't this in the public domain? And yes it is, but there are so few views that I know it's not being widely viewed by the Internet at large, and I also keep our names off it so we can't be easily searched for online. The photos I put on here, as this is a Google Blogger hosted blog, are already on the Google ecosystem because our photos are automatically backed up to Google Photos, so I'm not duplicating and adding more photos to the Internet. I'm just curating and showing certain ones.

Of course this is not stepping off the Internet altogether, which is what I would need to do if I wanted to completely safeguard our privacy. It can't be done. We already have a footprint and I don't kid myself for a minute to think that we could hide; nor would we want to, really. It's about engaging with this thing, safely, and on my terms - and that's what it comes down to in the end. So for me this means I shall step back from social media, from the likes and reactions and comments, and go back to a less "social" but more meaningful type of interaction online.

This blog will continue, though. Lots of love to you all, friends.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

Last week, a reporter and cameraman from the BBC visited our house to do a feature about home education. It was great fun, a real adventure for the kids to be interviewed! The team spent 90 minutes at our house, but of course they had to condense that down to a couple of minutes for the feature, and sadly the kids' interviews didn't make the cut. (A transcript article of the feature is here ) I had put my hand up for doing this because the reporter had every intention to make this a positive piece on home education, and so it was; the premise was to try and answer why there had been such an uptick in home education in the past few years. They interviewed two mothers, probably strategically chosen: me as the one who always wanted to home educate, and the other mum as someone who felt she had to due to her son's needs.  They interviewed me at length, and of course only a few seconds of that made it to the screen, but inevitably it was the part to do with social skills that th...

Back to meat after 20 years vegan - 4 years on

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t...