The Corner In The Middle

So, I’ve been heavily considering this for some time, see my prior post on this issue. I did it, I feel a little sick, but I did it.  I killed the facebook me.    I’m tired of the exaggerated, public digital life.  I don’t need to know who has the new funniest status update, not to mention the crappy adds and marketing that facebook has become.  I don’t need to see my coworkers and friends half naked drinking photos that just got tagged, I don’t care what “group” you recently decided to support, I don’t care if you “like” that Obama just made another awesome speech.  Today I understood why and how privacy is threatened, and the justification behind it, and it is true.  Privacy is not the same as it used to be and I don’t want to be a part of the site that chips away at it.   I’ve posted my last moments on my status, most people won’t jot my number or email, and it’s ok.  I don’t talk to them anyway.  I’m keeping my blog and probably linkden (sp?) just in case someone wants to contact me for a real life conversation, or a long lost friend remembers my name from high school (yes, I have a few I still try to find and would like to think sometime they’ll find me).

Here’s the thing.  The more I become what I feel, is socially responsible regarding sustainable foods, clean energy consumption, and being a conscious consumer, the more I become pissed off at the marketing ploys that I never paid attention to before.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ll never get rid of my ipod, I’ll never throw my droid into the toilet, I’ll never swear off my xbox or television, but I am really stepping back from the toils of corporate crap and the junk they constantly tell me is great.  I don’t want facebook to know me.  I don’t want them to market their crap to me.  I want my family and friends to think of me as more than a status update.  My family pictures are for me an my friends, not everyone in my profile.   For good or bad, it’s got to happen.  I confess, I’m going to miss it: checking out my friends quizzes, attacking my peers class comments passive-aggressively on their wall, looking through their drunk Saturday night pictures and making fun of them behind their back. But here’s the thing:

I’m not the same person anymore.  I want my privacy.  I have friends and we don’t need to keep updated on status every fifteen minutes, I say hello to them, I say “what I’m thinking,” I text them, they call me, we hang out, we drink Guinness and eat peanuts because we are old enough to do it respectfully, and in each other’s presence.  I have a life and the highlight of it is NOT that I had the funniest status update comment of the day, it’s that I’m me.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 6:48 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.