Why I didn't quit facebook

A couple of days ago it was Quit Facebook Day. The idea seemed to have spread online that facebook was an information vampire (and not a baseball playing, sparkly one). It was sucking up your (and your friends) information, it was causing you to be unemployable. You know because of all those photos of you drinking absinthe and biting the heads of budgies could decrease your chance of getting that job working for the Sydney Anglicans' department of being very, very moral.

Stephen Abram had an interesting post on the subject. Walt Crawford had a different view. But I didn't quit, I didn't not quit because of the recent changes to their privacy settings but I did not quit because facebook still works for me. It allows me to keep in contact with a few groups of people I would probably not keep in contact with otherwise. Not that I don't want to be in contact, but rather that I am lazy about things like letter writing. it also allows me to let people who seem to want to be in contact with me for some reason feel like they are in contact. Sure, I hide their feeds so I don't have to be bothered by their inane prattle. What was the point again?

I didn't quit facebook, I have however deactivated all my email accounts because I am worried about all the Nigerian email I get.

Countering the facebook experience is the fact that I haven't been on second life in almost three years. Why? Well, while facebook, despite its flaws is still best for what it does, Second Life doesn't actually seem to me to do anything. I enjoyed second life, met a few library folk there whom I may not have met in meat space, but it didn't do anything for me. I see SL as being an idea of what is to come, so I think it behoves information professionals to be familiar with the technology, to test it and see what we can do with it. But I have done that and am waiting for what comes next. That said, I didn't need to sign onto a web site to tell people I wasn't using SL. I didn't have to convince others to quit with me, nor did I even delete my account, just like I didn't delete my geocities account, nor make any announcement to tell people I don't use my yahoo chat any more. To move to the furthest reaches of sarcasm, I didn't send out a press release when I decided not to buy a new microfiche reader for Alice Springs Public Library. Dead tech doesn't need to be announced it just fades away.