by Corey Arterian

I deleted my Facebook account back in December. I’m not exactly sure why I did it, probably to test out my endurance. Perhaps I also did it to feel a sense of pride when saying “Oh, I don’t have a Facebook,” as if I were too cool for the social phenomenon. I still find myself sitting at my computer after having read my e-mails, wondering what it is that I forgot to do. My mouse hovers over the web browser. It usually takes me a couple seconds before I realize that I have nothing else to do on the Internet and my pile of work is waiting for me. I sometimes wish that I still had Facebook to check obsessively to feel like I am procrastinating for a good reason. Sophomore David Mikulka recognizes that Facebook “is a way of wasting time,” but he still believes “it’s useful.”

I have to wonder what it is about Facebook that is so intoxicating and causes people to spend hours upon hours staring at their computer screens. Perhaps it’s the ability to feverishly stalk a crush without them knowing, or feeling significant when getting not one, but two notifications, or maybe it’s even the validity that comes with having a ridiculous amount of ‘friends.’ As I think through these reasons, I question whether a Facebook account is really a healthy thing to have. I deleted my account right when I went home for winter break. I realized that the people who I considered to be my friends were people that I kept in contact with outside of Facebook. I suppose I didn’t want to deal with people writing on my wall saying “We should hang out soon!” when they could have just as easily called and made a real effort to see me. In essence, Facebook just keeps up the façade of a friendship, and I was tired of keeping up the charade. I used to find myself writing on people’s walls just to feel like I had made an attempt to keep in contact, when in reality, I probably would never see them outside of this cyber world.

This is an aspect that junior Alanna Peterson enjoys.

“There are some people I’ll never see again and I kind of love being able to see what’s going on in their lives.”

I too remember the excitement of finding friends from elementary school, but that soon wore off when the wall-to-wall conversations I had were stilted and awkward. How far can you go past the “HOW ARE YOU?!?!” and “OMG! I LOVE THAT MOVIE TOO!!!” with a person you haven’t seen in ten years. Not very far. I would actually friend someone from my past, see what they looked like, what they were into, and then defriend them. Lame, I know, but that was all I was interested in. I mean, when you friend someone from elementary school or even pre-school, is it because you really want to reconnect or is it because you just want to see if that one kid who picked his nose all the time is still a weirdo? I’m guessing the latter…

Maybe I am being pretentious and reading into the whole psyche of Facebook far too much, but as fellow Facebook Account Deleter Schaeffer Nelson put it, “I got off of Facebook because it was giving my soul a rash.”

That just so happens to be the best explanation I have heard.