Facebook Fadeout – Why I deleted Facebook

Posted on May 14, 2018 by Roland De Vries

My latest column in the Christian Courier.

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So, I’ve done it. My days of posting, commenting, liking, and sharing on Facebook are over. My account has been deleted, the app is gone from my iPhone, and the social media site is almost nowhere in my life. After years of almost daily engagement on Facebook, there is little regret, and almost no looking back.

Over past months there has been a very public campaign encouraging us all to #DeleteFacebook. That campaign was largely motivated by revelations that Facebook (a massive corporate entity!) has been extremely careless with the personal information it holds in trust for millions of people. Much of that data, it turns out, has been widely distributed, and has ended up in the hands of who knows who. But that corporate carelessness, and the related vulnerability of my own personal information, was not the reason for my dragging Facebook to the trash bin.

Rather, I walked away from Zuckerberg’s social media juggernaut on account of a growing sense that I just wasn’t contributing much to others’ lives through the platform. Certainly, I had a few friends who contributed to my life in important ways as they shared thoughtful reflections or other material (Are you reading this, Andrew Faiz!?). But I had a growing sense that my own sharing via Facebook was decidedly about… me. Posting anything at all entails a good deal of filtering, cropping, editing, and even blurring – and although these concepts comes from the world of photography, they apply equally to almost every Facebook post. Crafting a public persona (a self for public consumption) is the name of the game with social media, and I was playing the game. Continue reading →

Transparency and Honesty — a little distance goes a long way

Posted on March 5, 2015 by Roland De Vries

Questions of identity preoccupy us – much more than has ever been the case, historically speaking. This is so on account of the leisure time we are afforded, the levels of wealth we have attained, and the public personas we now necessarily create and craft via our social media profiles.

In the contemporary world we have time to develop an interest in particular artists or particular social movements; time and resources to shop for clothing and accessories that project a certain image or style; the ability to mark our bodies (hair die, tattoos, piercings, etc.) in ways that publicly declare our persona; we have online platforms that require us to make decisions about which photos or personal stories or opinions we will share. A few weeks ago I preached a sermon that explored, in part, how our shoes are even, now, a significant feature of this persistent crafting of our image. (See that sermon here.)

This whole exercise in creating and maintaining our image can be an exhausting affair – and it will surprise none of us to hear that some friends or acquaintances have given up Facebook and Twitter and Instagram (etc., etc.) for Lent. Giving up social media, in particular, can be a way to provide ourselves with room to breathe – a way to give up on the never-ending cycle of comparison and projection, instead seeking our identity where it truly and finally resides, by resting in God. Although social media is by no means the only locus in this cycle of self-referential and self-preoccupied identity formation, it is the most difficult to wrestle with given its ubiquity – giving it up no doubt helps puts life in perspective.

But aside from giving up social media, for Lent or otherwise, perhaps another way to humanize and de-pressurize the whole enterprise is through a kind of ironic or transparent naming of our self-preoccupation. A kind of detachment that is willing to examine ourselves – and to let others see us examining ourselves. Continue reading →

when Facebook dies

Posted on February 25, 2014 by Roland De Vries

What happens when Facebook dies?

Of course it isn’t a question of whether Facebook will die – only when. It might happen slowly as users gradually migrate to other social media platforms, or suddenly in the wake of some technological or financial meltdown. Either way, Zuckerberg will probably be safe with his millions (billions?!). But what will happen to the digital acres we have tended with such care.

At one level it’s a basic question of data – are my personal artifacts safe? What will happen to the megabytes that make up that picture of me and my mom at Niagara Falls in 2007, or that conversation with a friend in Vancouver back in 2010? Will it all simply vanish? Be sold off to a social media competitor – an estate sale of framed photos and vintage movie posters and so many bric-a-brac bytes?

What happens when Facebook dies?

But this is also a question of our identity. With the loss of those carefully maintained digital landscapes, do we lose a part of ourselves? And if so, what part of ourselves will disappear? Or perhaps this is a better question: Is there anything of great value on Facebook, whose loss we might or should mourn? Continue reading →