“Privacy concerns aside, I’m moving away from Facebook for a much simpler reason: boredom. Facebook homogenises the way we share information, and it’s just stopped being fun for me: post a link here to illustrate your political acuity, ‘like’ a post there to congratulate your friends for the ideology you share, tag yourself in a funny avatar because you’re, like, totally removed from how your face represents your identity. Whatever.”
I’ve written before with my thoughts on Facebook. Facebook operates on the notion of identity as a performance: you become the sum total of the links you post and content you upload. “Facebook stalking”, meanwhile, is based on the assumption that we can take the representation of an individual for that individual themselves.
I don’t Facebook strangers anymore. I prefer getting to know people the old fashioned way: peeling off the layers, one by one, wondering what I might find next.