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Goodbye Facebook: Have a Nice Day!

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Source: Commentary

Date: Jul 25, 2011

The information in the article below does not affect the regular Jumpseatnews Facebook page located at: www.facebook.com/jumpseatnews. That page will remain open and just reached 4,000 members and going strong!

I have received many friend requests from around the system for my personal Facebook page. During the past six months, I have ignored most of them because I was planning on closing my Facebook account altogether. That day has now come. I will no longer maintain a Facebook personal profile area.

Because I have added many flying partners and readers of this web site, I feel that I owe it to my everyone to briefly explain the rationale behind my decision---which is both personal and technical.

The Personal

After spending many hours on Facebook, I can honestly say that it has diluted the quality and growth of my friendships.  For example, I can read your status updates and comment or "like" them instead of actually having a conversation about how your life is going. I can look at your photos and/or location check-in’s without actually listening to an explanation of the great event you just had in your life.  Facebook is supposed to make us feel closer to other people, but instead, Facebook was starting to make me feel more alone.

Where I'm having difficulty is how I'm seeing it change how friends/family are starting to relate to one another on more meaningful levels. Facebook can, and often does, represent the bare minimum effort one can bother to make to still be 'friends' with someone.

I realized that I was spending hours on the computer when I could have been spending hours with someone face-to-face creating new memories.  I’d rather get together for coffee. I want to hear about your trips; I want you to meet my kids.  People did exactly that for years before Facebook.

There are many other reasons I’m quitting Facebook.  Here’s a short list of common ones.

The past few days, I’ve removed my FB app from my phone and had one of the best weekends in a long time---totally plugged into family---without that 3rd voice wondering if I should ‘check Facebook’. I never had to quit smoking or heroin, but this is what I’d imagine quitting cigarettes would be like; a few weeks of hell and wanting one, and then years wondering how you ever spent the time, money and energy smoking in the first place.

The Technical

I've been working with web sites since 1994. At that time, America Online was trying to be the entire internet. Everything was AOL Keyword this and chat room that, and most all pages were owned and managed by AOL. Then, the World Wide Web took off and web sites, RSS feeds, and open standards of sharing information and electronic resources grew and became the Brave New World of information sharing.

We all went along for that ride.

Social media grew also, but at a significant technical cost: Facebook has an enormous contempt for its users' privacy and practices a proprietary and rigid control over their data. Their misleading-named "Open Graph API" actually claims that they own your data and aims to be the one source for accessing it. To put this in Plain English: Facebook is the Wal-Mart of the internet, and it is fast destroying open standards, information sharing, and uses a proprietary network that runs contrary to the spirit and open nature of the internet. It's AOL all over again, and we've all gone back to 1997, but with an easier place to play farmville, post photos, and let someone know that you're eating a hamburger at DEN and golly, this ketchup is sure taking a long time to come out of this bottle, I hope I don't miss my flight! Type, click, publish. Thanks.

Conclusion

A few people have already told me I'm nuts for leaving Facebook. Some family/friends have had the same emotional reaction as if I said that I'm packing my family up and moving to Mogadishu.

They say that this will negatively impact my personal and social life. That social media is the future, and a terrific way of sharing and keeping up with friends. And that I'm really limiting my interaction with other people by doing this. And, of course, that I just "don't get" social media.

People also told me that I was nuts for starting a web site called Jumpseatnews and that having a web site wouldn't really be of much use to flight attendants because they were always away flying, and never near computers.

The bottom line for me is that Facebook, and most social media for that matter, improves my social and personal life about as much as a pile of dogshit.

That said, I'll still promise to keep the JSN Facebook page open and continue to improve upon it. It does have its purpose to supplement information from this main web site.

But as far as friends and family are concerned, my name is Christopher Lee, it's nice to finally meet you, and let's go grab some coffee. My treat.

Christopher Lee
Los Angeles, 2011

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