Facebook Suicide: What are you doing?

Last night I was talking with my friend ‘Tom’ about Facebook. In the winter, he committed what we’ve coined ‘Facebook suicide’. The term might already exist, but we like to think of it as our own. Since then, he has re-established himself on the site and sometimes still considers pulling the plug on his Facebook identity. I asked him what motivated his suicidal tendencies:

Me: So, Tom, can you tell me how you first decided to take yourself off of what could be called the most infectious social media site in history?

Tom: Well, I guess that it came down to this – the Facebook platform gives people an outlet to be disrespectful in a way that they wouldn’t be in real life. For example, in a forum setting, people who would never speak to me in a discouraging way would suddenly feel free to test out their pathetic attempts at witty sarcasm and put me down.

And I’m not even putting all of the blame on other people. For example, my ex-girlfriend got really upset about something I said on Facebook because she thought that something I wrote on somebody else’s wall was disrespectful and thought that it insinuated something that I didn’t mean. Meaning, maybe I was guilty of the same sort of thing. I wasn’t sure if it was me, the medium itself or if it indicated something specifically about the relationship I was in.

Me: Then what happened?

Tom: Well, I stopped going on Facebook for a while and then I realized I just wanted to delete my account. It was liberating.  It felt quite good because at the time, it was getting weird and intense. There was nothing creative going on, it was just all drama. At first, you feel weird for a day because you don’t get any messages and don’t have to think about what people are wasting their time doing. My account was closed for two months.

Then I had to go back on to maintain a group that I had started (for work). It started all over again. The problem with social media is that it’s good to connect people but it doesn’t necessarily keep them together. It’s like we all have to re-learn the playground rules and figure out what’s appropriate as we go.

Me: What do you mean?

Tom: Well, let me illustrate: shortly after I had committed Facebook suicide and re-joined, a friend of my ex-girlfriend added me when she was in a fight with my ex. Out of the blue, the friend wrote on my wall ‘why did you commit FBook suicide?’ I hate this aspect – that people can ask personal questions in a public forum. I erased the post and she called to ask why I erased it. That experience led me to the conclusion that I should limit her profile and then she deleted me. Collectively, we made nothing into something.

Me: So, what happened when you came back to life, so to speak?

Tom: The reactivation period was difficult. It was a strange time in my life, actually, and I can’t remember exactly how it worked. Everything was still there but I had to add people again, I think. Or, everything was there but I deleted all the people who I went to high school with and for a while I only had 30 friends or so. Then, one weekend I got bored and added a bunch of people again. I don’t know. Maybe Facebook is fine if you don’t take it too seriously.

I think that the people you associate with in real life affect how you approach social media. My friends were hyper aware of what I was doing online – they watched everything and were obsessed with what I was doing, even stupid stuff. I mean, these are people I’m already friends with. Before Facebook, they were never that interested in what I was doing. Or if they were, they just didn’t have the tools to access the information.

Are you writing this down?

Me: I’ll change your name, don’t worry.

Tom: Oh, okay. Thanks, buddy.

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Oh, the growing pains of social media. Maybe we’ll all look back on the mid-2000s as a repeat of adolescence and share the horror stories in our old age.