Reader: Let's not be friends

Photo / APN

It was all a terrible mistake. I signed up to Facebook to find out about meetings of a group I was in. I later realised that we could email or (radical idea) telephone each other. But by then I was getting offers of "friendship" from Polish welders or teenagers in Wisconsin.

I ignored them, of course, but I gradually realised that I was ignoring friendship proposals from my friends, too. So I emailed the few people I had "friended" and told them I was de-Face-ing.

"Life is too short to belong to Facebook," I wrote. "This decision does not reflect any disinclination to be your friend - but I will only be your friend in real life."

Then I deleted myself.

To say it felt like a liberation would be to overstate it, since I never really felt entrapped. But the more I hear of Facebook, the more I think of Aldous Huxley's 1931 novel Brave New World and its underlying idea that we would one day be so swamped with information - almost all banal and trivial - that we would be robbed of the ability to engage creatively with each other and our lives would become a sea of inconsequential minutiae.

A few days after my resignation from the community of 500 million Facebook users, I met a professional acquaintance who urged me to rethink. Facebook is a vital way of keeping in touch with the world, she said.

"But I don't feel out of touch," I wailed, "even though I don't know what you had for breakfast."

In any case, I added, I had just read a newspaper report saying that some people spent eight hours a day on Facebook.

"Yes," she said excitedly, "but it's not eight hours straight. You have it running in the background, so it's like ... fractionated time."

I studied her for a moment to make sure she wasn't taking the piss. Then I told her that if I ever wanted my life more fractionated than it already is, I'd let her know. I do hope she's not holding her breath.