You’ve got to be in it to win it…

Right, I admit it – this is getting ridiculous now. I need to start blogging again, I can’t pretend I don’t exist anymore, my ego just won’t allow this faux modesty to continue.

Since last May, I have tried to write dozens of entries, two of which got published despite them being awful, the rest I don’t think even got as far as being saved, let alone deleted.

So I’m going to attempt to take a stand against the fear of recrimination when I go back to writing the way I used to. Names will be changed to protect the guilty, except mine of course, which in my wisdom I chose to use as the name of this blog.

Perhaps it will help to fill the awful void that I know has been left in the lives of approximately 139 people since I decided to commit Facebook suicide. I know they miss me – well I know they miss the extra person on their friend count anyway.

I thought the hardest bit about killing Facebook would be filling the hours of my life that I would get back, but it turns out I’m very good at wasting time with or without Facebook and haven’t missed it at all.

What actually gave me the most painful insight was the fact that people, on noticing I wasn’t there anymore, assumed I had only removed them. Even though they knew there would be no reason for me to single them out. That and the fact that anyone who knows me well, and most of my FB friends did because I was quite selective, would have known that if I had a beef with them, the chances of me sloping off quietly rather than deploying some verbal bile is very slim.

It reinforced my dislike of the whole thing to think that my friends are actually that wrapped up in the popularity contest element of Facebook that they would assume I would use it as a way to slight them. I’m really pleased to have opted out.

That said, I’m not promising I won’t return to it – it wasn’t really ever supposed to be a grand gesture. I’ve been saying for years that something about it made me uncomfortable, and that discomfort has only increased as news has broken of investments from big business and the increasing estimated value of the site, basically as an immense intelligence source.

I think that I’m suitably lemming-like as it is; Facebook was just a step too far. Maybe my opinion will change. Maybe it’s a sign of my own insecurities, like back when it first started to bother me, that I don’t want to be there anymore.

But at least for now, when I next go back to Cambridge, for example, and get asked how I am by someone I haven’t seen for ages I won’t tell them a little anecdote to illustrate my answer only for them to say “oh yeah, I know, I saw it on Facebook”. That’ll be nice. Then again, I’ll probably not actually see anyone, because every social event will have been co-ordinated through Facebook, meaning that I don’t get invited.

I wonder if, once I start writing the blog again properly it’ll be read at all now that I can’t link it from Facebook? That had never occurred to me before…I guess the repercussions are yet to entirely reveal themselves. Last night I couldn’t enter a competition to win a years supply of free pizza because I had no Facebook account to ‘like’ the pizza place on…how long will I be able to cope with that kind of mindless discrimination?