I don’t use Facebook, much. If this had been, say, a year or so ago, I would’ve told you that I didn’t use it at all, because that was before I’d had to sign in daily for work reasons — suddenly, I was one of the people responsible for Popverse’s Facebook presence! — but, even with those daily visits, I find myself keeping to myself when it comes to personal business. I don’t post on there, and while I quietly, silently peruse the feed of friends and former friends telling me what they’re up to and what they’re watching, eating, or complaining about, I don’t even hit the Like or Comment buttons to let them know I’m out there. I’m a ghost.
For a long time, that’s because I was on Twitter instead; that was my chosen social media, up until… a year ago? Perhaps a little more? I pulled away from that slightly when Elon Musk bought the site, and then continued to step even further out the door every day since. Today, I’m barely there except for, again, work reasons. But even those seem less and less worthwhile, as Twitter (which is now, officially, “X” as of a few weeks back, twitter.com redirecting entirely and signing everyone out in the process) becomes more and more noise and no signal, just bots and right wing idiots filling up the feed and twisting algorithms for whatever fucking purpose seemed like an idea at the time.
Back to Facebook, though. I stopped posting there at some point because, in the marriage I was in at the time, Facebook belonged to my wife while Twitter was “mine.” It’s funny to think about that now; an early division of labor and digital assets years before we split. It made it easier when we did split, though, because it wasn’t as if we’d be tripping over each other. I remember, when I changed my status to “divorced,” the system asked me if I wanted to mute her posts to save myself from pain. There’s some kind of Black Mirror-esque irony there, if I’d wanted to look for it.
Facebook still feels very “not for me,” which is funny to consider when it offers me alerts with titles like “Your Memories on Facebook” on a daily basis. I have no memories on Facebook — not real ones, anyway, not meaningful ones or anything that actually connects me to the platform in a manner that I’d find myself missing it if it disappeared. Instead, when I click on those alerts, all I see are memes or posts without context from more than a decade ago, feeling like radio signals out of another life.