This has been in draft for quite some time. I didn’t publish it because it seemed rather trite to me. I recently reread it and figured that it does explain a bit about my departure from Facebook and worth putting out there in case one of my friends or family wanted more insight into my rationale.
The Beginning
I joined Facebook years ago. It’s been so long, I can’t even remember the year. I can’t even recall if I was an early adopter. I ramped up my friends list to a few hundred people. Most, of course, were old high school friends and family.
Over time Facebook had changed things. Their structure changed, and more importantly they changed their security/privacy settings whenever they tried to expose that which is the data of the user base. Sometimes those changes were public and overblown. Kudos to the smart ones that keep on top of these shenanigans, without their warnings, news articles and blogs, we’d really be screwed. I considered deleting my account altogether, but refrained. I did remove a lot of contacts, but I kept family and very close personal friends.
The Middle
I then got back into recruiting. It’s important to network when you’re a recruiter. There’s also a bit of an online branding approach that I considered once I got back into the recruiting field. I even had a few pages that I needed to manage. One was a fan site for a game that I played. Another page was a gaming community that I had got off the ground before the social media boom, and the last of the three pages was my own. A page where anyone could ‘follow me’ without actually having to ‘connect’ with me.
At this time I reached back out to those that I previously removed from my ‘friends’ list. I even found some old military contacts of mine. I even found a best friend that I lost contact with over 15+ years ago. I have actually reached out and chatted with them via instant message, did video chat or actually called them and spoke to them on the phone. These people I had lived with and worked with. We spent a lot of time together. It was awesome speaking to them. Time seemed to have not moved over the years, it was weird but in a good way.
I had also been contacted about the passing of old contacts. I actually had a notion that my cousin had passed via Facebook, before anyone had actually contacted me directly. Someone actually thought to go to Facebook!!! Than actually call and inform someone or be conscious of loved ones who may not care for the public blast of something so personal.
The End
My role as a recruiter is currently over. I have moved into being a member of information technology, specifically security. Facebook has never had a huge impact on my recruiting efforts. I know there was an inquiry here or there, but interactions around jobs, careers, or opportunities were a very minute occurrences. To be clear, Facebook was not at the forefront of my recruiting efforts.
As time went on I realized that it’s not a place for me. I discovered Google+ and appreciate it much more than I do Facebook. It’s about interaction on G+. It’s about finding others with interests similar to yours and talking about such interests. I find much more interesting topics on G+. Sure it has #caturday memes and an assortment of other silly things that are hard NOT to find on a social media platform, but for the most part…it’s more appealing to me. Facebook has missing person’s posts that aren’t factual, people post ‘deals’ that aren’t really deals, candy crush or mob wars invites that drive me crazy, and a ton of other things drives me crazy about the platform. I think snopes.com exists solely because the ignorance that comes to Facebook. Lest I forget the ambiguous drama “they’re not going to hurt me” posts with the sincere “hugs!” replies. We all have our problems and many of us have real friends we can count on to get over such problems. If you have an issue, contact a true friend. Don’t even get me started on the political posts during election season and beyond.
There’s something else about Facebook. I can’t really express what exactly it is. There are articles about social media making us feel more lonely. Maybe it’s knowing what’s going on in people’s lives, but not really. With that thinking, it’s all surface, lack of depth. Now that I think about it, I go there every day thinking that there will be something very interesting to latch onto and it doesn’t happen.