follow-through

On 21 June 2012 by matthew With 7 Comments - culture, lifestyle, social media, technology

I orig­i­nally stated in my opt-out post that I was going to delete my social media pro­files on July 1. The point for leav­ing my accounts active for a cou­ple of weeks was to allow friends to cap­ture my con­tact infor­ma­tion. The more I thought about it, though, most of my friends have my con­tact info. I shot mes­sages to a few peo­ple I wanted to make sure had my con­tact info. I fig­ure every­one who don’t can find me online. I am not that hard to find.

With that out of the way, I got down to the busi­ness of clos­ing accounts. I started yes­ter­day with Last.fm, Spo­tify, Rdio, Google+ on my Google Apps email. Today, I fol­lowed through with the biggies.


 

 

Inter­est­ingly, when I did my social media sab­bat­i­cal in 2010, only Face­book would allow you to deac­ti­vate, but not fully delete your account. Twit­ter has now jumped on board with the deactivation-before-deletion wait­ing period. My Face­book will offi­cially be deleted in 14 days. Twit­ter makes you wait 30 days before your account is deleted. I under­stand why there’s a delay. Some­times peo­ple make rash deci­sions, and the wait­ing period is a safety net. As for me…I just feel lighter hav­ing ini­ti­ated the process.

As dis­cussed in the opt-out post, I plan to keep my Google+ account active on my Gmail address. I have, how­ever, going to take every­one out of my Cir­cles except fam­ily mem­bers. I will no longer post any­thing publicly.

On a nerdy aside — It’s kind of cool to watch the ani­ma­tion when you delete a Cir­cle. It drops down and rolls out of sight. Bye Bye.

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7 Comments

  1. Reply
    Rich Cain 22 June 2012

    Matthew, After read­ing how many social media avenues you had to shut down, I started to won­der if using so many of them fac­tored into your social media “burn out”. Maybe I’m sim­pli­fy­ing it but I’m only on FB and Twit­ter and some­times I feel like they are run­ning me. Did you ever con­sider get­ting rid of all but one and just stick­ing with that for a while to see if that would be ok?
    Rich

    • Reply
      matthew 26 June 2012

      Good point Rich, but I think the num­ber seemed larger than it actu­ally was in my day-to-day life. There were a num­ber of net­works that I was a “mem­ber” of, but didn’t actively par­tic­i­pate. I just listed them all in these posts to demon­strate how per­va­sive social media (a very loose term) can be.

      I thought about cut­ting back to just one service/site. I kinda did that by keep­ing my Google+ open, but I will only com­mu­ni­cate with fam­ily through that ser­vice. In the end, I just felt like one might as well be five. This is a time where I needed to fol­low my I’m 100% incli­na­tion. We’ll see where this road takes me. So far…so good.

      • Rich Cain 26 June 2012

        Matthew — Good point that one may as well be five. I hadn’t thought of it that way. I’ve resisted the temp­ta­tion to join any­thing but Twit­ter and Face­book. Well, I guess I am also in LinkedIn. But I don’t use that very often. I feel the promise of L.I. has been over sold falling well short of the mark. You hear/read that you can’t get hired unless you’re on L.I. Not sure if that’s true but I don’t see much value to it. Maybe I’m not using it fully. But it seems as if peo­ple just want to have as large a net­work as pos­si­ble on there with­out truly net­work­ing or help­ing each other out. I asked two dozen peo­ple if they would want to share rec­om­men­da­tions with each other and i only got a cou­ple of peo­ple to take me up on that. So, what’s the point?

        It seems like that is a sim­i­lar prob­lem with fB. Peo­ple seem to want to grow their num­ber of friends. I don’t know what the magic num­ber of friends is, but peo­ple seem to want as many as they can get to say yes to friend requests. But of my 150 or so friends, I would guess that 95% of the post­ings come from about 15 peo­ple and more than half the peo­ple on my friend list never com­ment. And they even ignore you when you send them a mes­sage or com­ment on their wall. Why are you on FB if you don’t want to com­mu­ni­cate? Or maybe the bet­ter ques­tion is why did you ask to be my friend or why did you con­firm my request? I don’t under­stand the per­son who sends a friend request and then they never, ever com­mu­ni­cate with you even one time to say “Hey, how’s it going?” So I have pulled way back on FB. I don’t even check it every day anymore.

        With Twit­ter, I just use it as a news feed. I follow/am fol­lowed by only a cou­ple of peo­ple I actu­ally know. I like Twit­ter as a way to keep track of colum­nists and cer­tain blogs. It seems eas­ier to me than google reader.

        Any­way, I do look for­ward to stay­ing in tough through your blog (I’ve got the RSS feed through G. Reader!)

        Take it easy!

      • matthew 27 June 2012

        You and I are –>here< — about peo­ple on Face­book. I used to get a lot of ran­dom friend request. Ini­tially, I would take the time to see if we had mutual friends. If not…ignore. There is the pos­si­bil­ity that I know some­one that none of my friends know. For instance, if you and I met at a con­fer­ence or some event, and we struck up a good con­ver­sa­tion or hit it off; we might con­nect on Face­book. After a while, though, I just stopped doing that, and treated Face­book as a place where I would only con­nect with peo­ple that I was will­ing to share my per­sonal life with. Fun­nily enough, that’s was part of my deci­sion to leave. I strug­gled with feel­ing that I was often just talk­ing into the wind. I also started to think about whether the 300, or so, peo­ple on my “friends” list really needed to know things about me. I’m gen­er­ally an open per­son, but I dis­cov­ered that I do, in fact, have boundaries.

        I feel the same way, as you, about LinkedIn. I have friends that do HR and recruit­ing, and they tell me that LinkedIn is a good tool. That may be so, but I have yet to hear of one per­son that I know get­ting a job because of LinkedIn. The bulk of my expe­ri­ence was peo­ple try­ing to con­nect with me because I work at the FDA. Just as you men­tioned about the prac­tice on Face­book, peo­ple would want to con­nect, but offer no con­text or fol­low up to show that the con­nec­tion request was gen­uine. I refused to be a pawn in someone’s attempt to inflate their alleged sphere of influence.

        Thanks, as always, for pro­vid­ing inter­est­ing and sub­stan­tive feedback.

  2. Reply
    robert 23 June 2012

    Glad to see you fol­lowed through with your plans but curi­ous about why you didn’t keep Flickr as a means to show­case your photography?

    • Reply
      matthew 26 June 2012

      Robert, I thought about keep­ing Flickr open, but my use of the site has waned over the years any­way. I saw this time as an oppor­tu­nity to finally walk away from the site. I’m still strug­gling to deter­mine what I want to do with pho­tog­ra­phy. I am either in a pho­to­graphic rut, or my heart is lead­ing in me in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion. I don’t quite know where the dust will set­tle on my pho­tog­ra­phy, but I think that if/when I do get around to dis­play­ing my work, it will be on a site I con­trol. Inter­est­ingly, pho­tog­ra­phy is one of the things that made me think a long time about jump­ing out of the social media scene. There is a great com­mu­nity of pho­tog­ra­phers on social media, and I have enjoyed see­ing their work. The thing for me, though, is that I never really felt like I was mak­ing con­nec­tions — beyond the ones I had. I made friends like you, Kim, Vic­to­ria, and Shawn, because of the pho­towalks — not Flickr, Picasa, Insta­gram, or any other site.

      *shrug*

  3. Reply
    Martha Krafton 1 September 2012

    Your tim­ing on Face­book was excel­lent. There have been so many nasty post­ings on the polit­i­cal side. I posted some­thing the other day and before I knew it, my nephew and one of my old neigh­bors were in the mid­dle of some insane argu­ment even though they don’t even know one another. So here is my Face­book post today:

    The com­bi­na­tion of Face­book post­ings and our cur­rent neg­a­tive polit­i­cal cam­paign­ing has led me to make a deci­sion. When you post some­thing on Face­book, it tells me some­thing about you. When I post some­thing that’s reflects my polit­i­cal opin­ion, it tells you some­thing about me. You may think my opin­ions are com­pletely idi­otic and you can com­ment to that effect …it will tell me some­thing more about you. My deci­sion is at least until the elec­tion I will not com­ment on anyone’s polit­i­cal post­ing. I think Face­book is bad place to debate or discuss—tone, sar­casm and other emo­tions are almost impos­si­ble to read on Face­book. (except for hatred …. some­how that seems to come across clearly, doesn’t it?). So sin­cerely, good luck to you, your beliefs and can­di­dates and may the most skilled lead­ers win!

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