As a year comes to a close in which Facebook has been plagued by a series of security scandals that point to lax protection of consumer privacy, a number of prominent figures have announced they are leaving the platform.
Among others who have publicly announced their exit was legendary tech journalist Walt Mossberg, who drew a lot of attention for leaving given his reputation for being at the vanguard of tech trends.
Like all of them, I have on many occasions seriously considered leaving Facebook, and ultimately would prefer to be off of it, as being on Twitter already absorbs a lot of my social media time. I don’t post on the site particularly often, or use it to post regular updates on everything I’m doing or thinking or feeling, and I have significant concerns about how it handles my personal data. I’m careful about what I post publicly and limit acceptance of friend requests to people I know in real life (so if we interacted on Twitter and I never responded to your friend request, please don’t take it personally). But there’s one reason that I find it hard to quit.
Quite simply, I find it difficult to lay off Facebook because it remains the best tool for keeping in touch with the broadest cross-section of people in my life, a task that I find gets harder as I get older.
When I was still in school, the largest concentration of friends were people I interacted with on a daily basis. By college, most of them were classmates besides a handful of close friends with whom it was relatively easy to stay in touch. Even early in my working career, it was easy enough to find time to keep in touch with friends in other cities by email, phone, and in-person visits.
Now, however, my various responsibilities (as well as all of the things my friends are juggling) leave limited time to talk on the phone beyond my family. Also, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve collected friends from more stages of my life, and those friends have spread out across the country and across the globe. There are plenty of people whose lives I would like to be updated on who I don’t have the ability to interact with on a regular basis. Were it not for Facebook, I would probably lose touch with many of them altogether. Though I recognize all of its failings and understand that social media interaction is no substitute for real human interaction, I also feel that in moderation Facebook is a helpful, supplemental tool for remaining connected to a lot of people with whom I would probably otherwise lose touch.
