Kicking the social networking habit

This week, I finally summoned up the courage to quit Facebook. In my mind, there has been a swell of ill-feeling towards the social networking phenomenon for about a year or so. It was quelled when I quit MySpace in June of last year, but since Facebook reached critical mass in about September, I've become re-frustrated by the essential pointlessness of it all, and increasingly resentful of my dependance upon it.

Social networking sites allow people like me to give themselves the illusion of a broad network of friends. That is to say people in their 20s, very possibly single, and feeling slightly abandoned because many of their friends have either settled down or have moved away.

Getting in touch with old friends, reacquainting with former objects of affection and even noseying on people who I hadn't formally made "friends with" but who's life it became fascinating to monitor - just a bit voyeurish, but not as much as, say, watching Big Brother: Celebrity Highjack.

When I found Facebook, I thought I'd found MySpace without its drawbacks, and happily extolled its virtues to anyone who seemed willing to listen.

However, the aforementioned moment of critical mass came when Facebook moved from the early adopter phase. This meant dealing with long-forgotten schoolfriends, colleagues from work who I barely knew or even just recognised my name and people who I couldn't even recall speaking to but apparently just wanted to be associated with me. My "friend count" swelled from a modest 30 to about 70 or so withing the space of a couple of weeks, mainly because everyone seemed to be in competition to get the highest number of "friends".

All of a sudden, my news-feed was full of irrelevant information about people who I didn't care about, while I tried to deal with the ridiculous amount of application requests that promised such illumnating journeys into my own pysche to reveal what my stripper name would be, what kind of kisser I was etc.

The most insidious of the 'book anomalies were the desperate attempts to create massive groups with millions or so members. I must admit to attempting this myself, with the worthy intent of getting Angus Deayton reinstated as the presenter of Have I Got News For You. By far the worse and most blatant attempt at self promotion came from some needy fool who created a group called "Six Degrees of Separation - the experiment."

When I last checked this group, it was up to something like three and a half million members. I thought about posting on the forum, questioning the creator's methods, asking how the experiment would be measured, and accusing them of running what was essentially a vanity project. Unfortunately, I didn't think my voice would be heard amongst all the other people who'd started off threads like "does god exist" and "say one thing about the person above you".

My first act was to decline the few friend-whoring dregs who tried to add me, swiftly followed by a phased deletion of some of the tertiary and then secondary friends. None of these people made any comment about me deleting them. Even people who I worked with. I then trimmed down my profile information (which had in all honesty perhaps been a little too long) to a brusque description of my current activities and a quote from Apocalypse Now.

To quote Hunter S. Thompson, the decision to flee came suddenly. Or maybe not. Maybe I had planned it all along, subconsciously waiting for the right moment. Whatever, after another round of snooping on the few remaining friends that remained, I found myself going through the deactivation process like some kind of base motor-reflex, with no real road-to-damascus moment inpriring the act. That was a week ago.

When I attempted to leave MySpace 18 months ago, I was back on within a few days, worried that I was missing out on wild flirting with a lonely, adventure-seeking 24 year old single girl from South Staffordshire. Things seem different now. I think the fad, like the wider "Web 2.0" revolution will die out - I'm not the only one with these sentiments, and there's only so many times we'll keep moving out west to new services before we realise they're all exploiting the early adopters who bring in the mainstream who in turn ruin it by being the brain-dead miasma we've come to expect them to be.

Yuwie, anyone?