Exiting Facebook

Recently, I thought I'd close my personal Facebook account (I have another I use for work purposes).  For a variety of reasons really.  But the decision to close it had been reached.  So, I went to get rid of it.

Now, bearing in mind I've been on Facebook for the best part of five years, there was a lot of baggage to leave behind.  Rather than going cold turkey and hitting the delete button, I decided to deactivate it.  I didn't tell anyone that's what I was doing.  I just did it.  The way different people reacted to that was a lesson in fascination.  Most, I presume, didn't notice.  But definitely not all.  The reaction from the 'not all' group gave me lots of food for thought!

Anyway, it turned out that by getting rid of my Facebook account, I was causing myself no end of grief because I'd forgotten that I'd used it to log in to a range of services over the past few years.  Services I may only periodically have remembered I had.  Stuff I didn't even notice I needed.  Until I needed it.  And then I couldn't log in because my Facebook account wasn't around.

In the end, I reactivated it.  I haven't actively used it since then, I just want to have the account to simplify getting into the various services I need until the point at which I've nailed all of them and reset the account details.  It has all the privacy settings turned up to the strongest level I can manage while I'm gradually extracting myself from it.  It could be a VERY long process.

Aaargh!

It turns out that we're not involved in social networks anymore so much as a form of social wool which has knitted and knotted itself together and is darned difficult to untangle yourself from.