Back in the day (flipping heck, that makes me sound old!), I was a tad obsessed with Facebook. I honestly can’t remember when I first joined, but it was either while I was still at uni, or had just finished (I’m pretty sure it was back when you had to have an university email address for my uni). Back then, it was great. My uni had just blocked Xuqa and MySpace wasn’t as popular as it had been in our second year. Facebook was a neat, easy to use, site, and had a certain aura of exclusivity.
Without being snobby, that might be why I’ve lost interest. When we first started using Facebook, it was only available to certain people. You generally only connected with the people you were talking to at the time. Obviously as time goes on, you no longer see those people, but at least with Facebook, you can “reconnect”. No. No you wont.
Facebook opened up to everyone and anyone and that was great…at first. But as more people got on the site, the amount of pointless updates increased. I’m not claiming to be the most interesting person in the world. Anyone who follows me on Twitter will know that. But – what do I mean here? People who use Twitter are generally a bit more internet savvy, they know the boundries on what is suitable to share on line (I just ate a nice bowl of chips) and not (I wuv my snugglums). Facebook users (and I am being VERY general here – I am not specifically saying “Bob is…”) are less knowing, and more likely to share the minutiae, often in hideous text speak. (There have honestly been times that I’ve seen a status update and had to think about what it could be translated as!)
I like to give something up for Lent, but most of the time, I can’t think of something that I want to give up, to see if I can manage without it. The last two times I’ve given something up were bread (that was a killer, especially because I love toast) and chocolate (which wasn’t as hard as I though, but did require some willpower, especially as I had to pass a vending machine full of chocolate everytime I made a brew.
This year, I decided to give up Facebook for some of the reasons above. I’ve not really missed it so far, although have becoming increasingly irritated with the site – if you disable your personal account, your fan page disappears as well. How clever. I had to set up a friendless account just to admin the page. Faff!
Have you given something up for Lent this year? Or did you give something up and have already broken?
