There’s a discussion about reasons for deactivating FB here with people having lots of thoughts about why they never joined Facebook or only ever joined using false information. That’s all great and there are very important privacy reasons for staying off FB. But there are also reasons why some people have to join and why they do so under their legal names.
I commented here a few days ago that I was leaving Facebook. It would be more noble to say it was because of Facebook’s election behavior and horror at what a cesspit Cambridge Analytica is, but the reality is I’d deactivated my account three months ago with the plan to decide whether to delete it or not when the semester ends in May. I’d deactivated because FB was *too* good at keeping me in touch with friends (and friends of friends) and family. My mother was diagnosed before the holidays with stage 4 cancer and isn’t on Facebook so I became the go-to source for private messages from her friends and our family about her health. It was too much and stressing me out so I dreaded going on the site.
Which takes me back to why I joined. I became aware of FB about a year or so after it started when you still needed a college or university affiliation to join, but saw it as an undergraduate thing (I was in grad school at the time). I’m not into pictures and didn’t like the look of the interface or the fact that everyone who one connected with was called a “friend.” Things went on that way for a long time. It wasn’t that I didn’t use social media (I was an early adopter of Twitter), but felt fine about being left off of FB.
That changed 5 years ago when I became aware that Calls for Papers, conference panels and other important career related opportunities were all happening in my field via a FB group and I was missing out. I was on the job market and needed access to this information and felt I needed to be part of this community. I also felt I needed to use my “real,” professional name because that was my whole reason for joining. It worked and I got several conference papers and job leads out of it. Facebook also connected me with a huge community of women of color in academia across the world — connections and discussions that I am going to miss. This is all to say that I know there are people who have no option but to belong to FB, at least until something better with a critical mass of users comes along.
This is even more true in some parts of the developing world where FB has turned itself into the internet for its users in ways AOL only dreamed of doing.
My point in all this is to say this is not only the moment to congratulate ourselves on not having joined the site or for leaving / boycotting, but also to look at Facebook (and Twitter, Google and Amazon) and other sites that harvest our data and figure out how to start regulating them. This is all the more true of educational “learning management system” (LMS) platforms that are gathering data on K-12 and college and university students who have no option but to use them.
I’m writing this because I want to know what’s going — how we can respond not just individually but collectively.