facebook in moderation.

I’ve been thinking about giving up Facebook. Like closing my account and living off the FB grid and I’m wondering if I could really do it.

Like, really. Everyone knows the cliché jokes about facebook. It’s even a bit Ray Ramonoish (aka lame) to even be commenting on it. But seriously, Facebook is both uber pathetic but almost a nessessary evil at this point in the game.

At first I really did believe FaceBook was just the second or third or 90th coming of Friendster. That soon the fad would pass and there would be another site that I’d have to sign up for and then collect friends on, but I’m wondering now if it’s really more comparable to email rather then a MySpace or a LinkedIn. If it’s some slice of technology that is actually here to stay and as time goes is actually mandatory for living in year 2000′s.

I’m wondering if it’s something that can be lived without (ok, yeah I know I can live without most things, but I mean live without in the social context. ie: you can’t really live without a cell phone anymore, or email for that matter, or a web page if you are a business). But I wonder if Facebook is like that.

I mean, first off – I use facebook a lot and not just for checking it 20 times a day and reading people status updates (which feels so super lame when no new updates have been added the last 4-6 times I’ve been on…) but I use it to post new blog entries, to have a biz fan page for the 10 spot, to send invites for events, to stalk crushes, to find out dirt on Ex’s, to check out potential employee’s or business contacts, to make lewd public jokes with friends – like it really is useful in that modern Gen Y kind of way, but I’ve been wondering lately, as I’ve had more time on my hands being in the ‘peg, and checking my FB everytime few hours, if it’s just the most stupid waste of time on the planet and if I should be giving it up, or like I posed earlier, is it really here to stay… Twitter I can see going down, but FB, I’m not so certain…

There was this one time where I was stalking a guy crush, I think it was the fellow from Shark Water and at the time I didn’t want to friend add him, because – I don’t do adds, people have to add me – it’s a power thing – and so I had my friend add him so that we could have access to his page. Anyway, it took weeks for her request to go through, not because he was ignoring her or denying her request, but because he was never on. Like never, no updates, no posts, no links, nothing. Then finally after quite a long stint (or it was long to us because we were so eager) he did this giant friend accept batch – like swear to god he must have had about 50 friend requests and it seemed like he finally got around to checking his FB and then took care of all the accepts in one batch.

After seeing that (and waking up to the fact that I was checking my page (and my friends) like 600 times a day I felt like a loser ass bastard) I said to myself ‘I want to be so busy that I don’t have time to check my facebook’ soon after, I did become that busy, with opening up the new 10 spot, I was honestly going weeks without an arbitrary moment to spend being filled in on feeds from my online friends.

Now, looking back and being soooo much wiser, I realize that wasn’t quite the answer. I shouldn’t have to have an onslaught of work to keep me from obsessively checking my FaceBook and I guess I shouldn’t have to banish myself from my account either, because, hell, it is a useful tool when used with caution. Who knows, there might be a crush in my future that I have to see if he is in any douchy pics of him holding a bottle of vodka at Brant House…

At any rate and as with everything in life: Moderation is the key. A glass or two of wine is ok when out for dinner with some friends, but waking up to a two-four and a mickey of vodka for breakfast is certainly not, and so, I’m going to be skimming back on my intake of FB to more moderate levels…

so um, off to post this on Facebook…