Six Questions to Ask Yourself If You're Quitting Facebook

With the premiere of The Social Dilemma, I'm seeing even more people than usual quitting Facebook or limiting their interactions on it.

Lately, even I've thought about pulling back, but I thought that before I did, I should ask myself some questions that seem important if you're going to remove one of the greatest tools for connectivity that's ever been given to humanity, democracy-compromising and political-hellscaping aside.

Here's what I came up with:

1. How are you going to remember people's birthdays?  If you think I'm going to forgive you for forgetting my birthday because you're not on Facebook hahahahaha have fun buying a planner and writing everything down again, because I remember those days, and I hated them. I hated those days. Those days were not fun.

2. I do theater. How am I going to promote theater without Facebook? Where are people going to see that I'm doing whatever it is I'm doing? Not that they care, but where will they see the things they don't care about? Yes, Facebook has not made promoting events easy without paying them to sponsor the event so they can get you likes from a Like Farm in Bangladesh, but what was the alternative? I told one of my students the other day that back before social media, I used to have a list of phone numbers, and I would call down the list letting people know I had a show coming up. You want me to go back to THAT? Absolutely not. Not a chance.

3.  If you're off Facebook but staying on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, are you aware that not only are those platforms just as bad in terms of sowing the seeds of division, promoting conflict, and getting people who lip-sync to Mussolini speeches development deals, but the insinuation if you choose THOSE platforms (especially Instagram) over Facebook, is that you actually just want to put out YOUR opinion, and YOUR photos, and YOUR announcements, but you don't really care about seeing anybody else's? Instagram is the most self-involved of all the platforms, so if you're not getting rid of it along with Facebook, which owns it, by the way, then you're really showing your hand in terms of how much you care about anything that's happening in the life of anybody you know.

4.  Do plan on texting/emailing/calling (OMG calling, can you even?) all the people closest to you regularly to make sure they're doing okay?  Years ago, I lost someone important to me, and someone who had quit Facebook, that I was close friends with, had no idea it happened, and because he also quit Facebook without bothering to do the work required of a person without Facebook to, you know, be a good friend, he had no idea. Facebook and other platforms have replaced a lot of the grunt work we used to have to do as family and colleagues and friends, and so much of it are things we haven't done in years. Some of us have simply forgotten how to connect without it. So if you're going to give it up, have you give a lot of thought to whether or  not you can even fit all that grunt work back into your life? Are you prepared to go back to the days of thinking "Wow, I haven't talked to Chris in awhile" and then calling Chris and finding out a lot has been going on with Chris, and now you're going to be on the phone with Chris for the next seven hours?  You ready for that?  That's what we're looking at here.

5.  Is it possible you could just...be better about social media?  I'm not saying we're not smart enough to totally outsmart the algorithms. I have accepted that I am dumber than any and all machines, including toaster ovens, but, hear me out, why are we barely using the tools given to us to make the social media experience better?  How many of us actually go the extra step of unfollowing--not blocking (WWIII), but unfollowing--people who upset us?  Is it because we secretly kind of enjoy getting upset and fighting?  One day I was in a punchy mood and I scrolled past at least seventeen lovely posts that would have made me smile had I spent any time on them until I found a political post I hated so I could fight with the person who posted it.  Ladies and gentlemen, you are seeing on your feeds what you yourself have created.  Facebook has tricked our relatives into being racist. Our relatives were racists, responded positively to racist content, and proceeded to get that content fed to them on a steady diet. I'm not saying that Facebook should be let off the hook, but let's not pretend Uncle John was a tree-hugging liberal until Zuckerberg got his hooks into him.  Social media can exacerbate problems. Yes, that's true, but it doesn't often create them out of nowhere. The exacerbation is enough to demand oversight, but again, these platforms are tools people years ago would have killed for. To be able to share ideas and articles and to watch your grandchildren grow up from halfway across the world without needing to be mailed photos every few weeks (although still do that, save the USPS) is such a gift, and to think we would walk away from it rather than collectively try to tame it is so disheartening to me.  Can we tame it?  Is that possible?

6.  How are you going to know when celebrities die?  And how are you going to know when you think they've died but they really died nine years ago?

I realize that last one isn't as important as the previous ones, but it's still worth thinking about.