In one week, on March 14th my Facebook account will be permanently deleted. If I choose to open an account after that, I will start over completely. Facebook does give you the option to deactivate your account which is very different, here the text from Facebook.com -
What is the difference between deactivation and deletion?If you deactivate your account, your profile and all information associated with it are immediately made inaccessible to other Facebook users. What this means is that you effectively disappear from the Facebook service. However, we do save your profile information (friends, photos, interests, etc.), so if you want to reactivate at some point, your account will look just the way it did when you deactivated. Many users deactivate their accounts for temporary reasons and expect their information to be there when they return to the service. If you permanently delete your account, all personally identifiable information associated with your account will be purged from our database. This includes information like your name, email address, mailing address, and IM screen name. Copies of some material (photos, notes, etc.) may remain in our servers for technical reasons, but this material is disassociated from any personal identifiers and completely inaccessible to other users. Facebook also does not use content associated with accounts that have been deactivated or deleted.
Many of my friends and family have asked why am I doing this. Often people ask if somebody said or did something awful to me on FB. Nope. An other group of people almost seem upset by the idea of me leaving.
Truth be told I have an addictive nature about me. This hold very true with certain types of social network sites online. The constant updating of words, stories, pictures, videos, and news kept me hanging on the FB all the time.
In an average day I would spend close to an hour plus looking at FB. Now, we're talking 5 minute intervals constantly through out the day. Add that to the 1 to 2 hours of Hulu(TV) a night, that was 3 hours plus a day of basically wasted time. For the record, I greatly enjoy hanging with my wife and watching our favorite shows together while Ryan is asleep.
Every couple has various issues that they deal, work, and change regarding each other and for me I knew that this would be a topic that would have ill effects on my relationship with my wife and family. And that ladies and gentlemen is the reason I quit Facebook.
I need to choose things in my life that give me a hobby / distraction but have a higher value (in my view of course). Facebook to me was basically a Passive Time Killer. It just sucked away my time while basically giving me little to nothing. With this blog and the others still give me the connection via stories, pictures and videos to people who really want to see / know, and it helps me work on my writing, typing, thinking, and language skills. To me there is a higher value.
In the end I look at it much like a drunk looks at booze. There are many people in this world that can handle drinking booze with no ill effects to their life. And some can not. Facebook had a major potential to be detrimental to my relationships.
That is why I choose to permanently delate my account instead of just deactivate it, I knew that by leaving it hanging out there, I could fall back into the old habits. It is much better that I cut off the Head so to speak.
Does this make it clearer to you now? If you have questions or comments, please feel free to post them below. This could be a great opportunity for a discussion.
