Blog
Removed/refreshed
I deleted my Facebook account last week. I’d been wondering for a while what to do with it.
I opened the account in December 2008 thinking that Facebook would be fun professionally more than personally. I said to friends soon after I’d begun that it was “fascinating and dorky.”
I thought that as a person who is public in terms of her art and writing I could post ideas, perceptions, and experiences and then conversation would ensue. Not so. The reason? Dullness. Due to limited space in which to articulate anything. I like conciseness but not the confinement that Facebook imposes. Also, due to the superficially mundane things that people report. I’m all for prosaic detail, noticing, loving, enjoying, and feeling its beauty and depth. The prosaic is pretty much the content of our lives, but on Facebook the prosaic lacks the extensiveness that makes both the earthly world and life in it interesting. Another reason for lack of exchange was the number of “friends.” Because my intention had been to use Facebook professionally–posting information about new performances and publications, along with having “conversational” contact–my friends list grew to a cumbersome and, ironically, unfriendly size. Too much stuff and not enough substance.
When I signed on to Facebook I was wanting to update my website, not only the information but also the entire design and logic of it, so that it would be 1) more practical for users than before and 2) more representative of my current aesthetic, my newer and older work, and my thinking. The redesign didn’t start until I began talking with Godat, a small design firm here in Tucson, in Spring 2009. Godat suggested that the new website include a blog. Great idea! Especially since beauty propelled by economy and necessity, which can free and focus a writer rather than confining her, has become a nexus of my writing process. After the new website launched, I realized that the blog was satisfying certain desires that I’d had for online social networking.
Facebook, whose purpose is to bring people closer to one another, felt removed and removing to me. So I needed to remove it. I sensed my energy being drained, not by being on Facebook but by staying away from it while imagining that I wanted to be making use of it. Responding to real life rather than an imagined one has refreshed me.
- May 28, 2010
- Filed under: Bookshelf, art, and media, My work
- Comments 1
This is such thoughtful, important writing. The first and last two sentences of this piece thrill me (cracked up at your wondering “what to do with it”).
Like email, Facebook is a cultural obligation or expectation or fantasy of connection…because I don’t understand why I need it, I’m not on it, but I am on myspace, primarily in order to download mp3s of my music. I don’t think you can do that on Facebook… Anyway I understand the sensation of wondering what to do with the invisible connections brought in through myspace, and have discovered that attempting to figure them out or “play the game” of this has on more than one occasion gotten in the way of my creativity, my actual work.
On the one hand it’s promotion, on the other, it’s sitting at my computer.
Looking forward to more writing by Joanna about the imagined vs real connections/work that happens on or away from the computer, and perhaps, more pros and cons of each…