An emotional question, not a technical question: why do we deactivate our Facebook accounts?

The common answer is "spending too much time". Fair enough. There are others and cleverfacebook has replied to most of these with suggestions because they don't want us to deactivate. In fact, they don't delete anything. They just set a bit that stops traffic but otherwise, it's all still there stuffed in the cracks of the iron the way a sharecropper stuffed newspaper in the cracks of a shack to keep out the wind. So, nothing is deleted and if we embarassed ourselves, we painted the rows and columns in bitter red ink.

Is it like heroin or cigarettes? The only way to stop is to be sure there is none around and no one who can provide any. Fine but what exactly is IT?

Security? There ain't none. After being riff'd from my last job a "visitor" entered my home studio and checked the contents of my computer, left a recognizable sign so I'd know it was a professional (a courtesy and a warning). So if someone wants us, that's way easy these days and no, there isn't much one can do unless one wants to sit in a corner locked and loaded. Sorry, can't live like that and it doesn't frighten me.

Tired? Sure. That is pretty easy to understand. Of what? Answering. There comes a point when one realizes few are doing much more than advancing the same causes with slightly different approaches like a song one sings over and over again until as Arlo wrote about CONO, he was planning dinner and Goodman deserved better. Nothing is being learned.

Not useful? I'm not sure we should use each other in conversation like that. I deleted most of the connections to people who only used FB to send me their gig dates or show announcements. IOW, if the only point of the conversation was to sell me something, I didn't consider that a friendship, virtual or otherwise. It was too much like people who called me to buy life insurance or sell me investments. I don't need friends to do that. I could put a new song there and maybe a few real friends would notice or care.

I need friends. A friend helps, a friend needs friends to help and when I can do that, it feels good. I want to feel good but slowly and inevitably I suppose, FB came to be a political party gathering where almost everyone is trying to argue about the future, blame the past, curse the present and otherwise, talk me into doing something I'd already made my mind up about. (bad sentence construction; frack strunk and white). Because of that, I kept censoring myself, trying to be too careful, too correct, too... not me.

There is something in that. Facebook becomes a false face. It is too much like going to the office where the boss has a Romney sticker on his desk (still) and his subordinate rants about Obamacare destroying America and I have to silent because these are people who rif people who aren't like them. Romney Scouse Git, so to speak.

And I can't play or sing with a false face and all it seems I ever really wanted to do was play and sing. And taxes are due and the girl has to go back to college and the mortgage is killing me. I guess Betty White was right: Facebook, what a waste of time....

I will miss the Curvy Girls Appreciation Page.

pretty much all i know about face book is that it is like a bermuda triangle. people seem to go there and mysteriously vanish.

As Facebook changes the design continuously making it evermore difficult to predict who will see a post and which posts I see, its communications usefulness has declined precipitously. I realize one can improve that by tinkering with the settings but after doing that a few times only to have the design change again so it can emphasize its own business model for advertising and harvesting information about me and mine, it becomes too much work for too little communication.

In the beginning it was a free service that was worth more than what it cost. That ratio is fast turning upside down.

Sometimes I really do want "to hide [my] love away".

I get so much stuff on there that it is sometimes hard to keep up with it all.

i have heard people (people in the 3D world) say there can be a lot of drama on there (on face book), i don't really know.

i have seen drama break out here too, but maybe it is different?

maybe sometimes there are people who can't wait to have a "reason" to qualify their hatred?

3D worlds and mail lists before them were dramadies.

Sure, there is drama anywhere there is conversation. It doesn't have to be hateful. FB drama doesn't bother me because there is less hateful stuff there than where anonymity is enabled. During elections I expect it because rhetoric heats up and people are working hard to rile the other sides into committing gaffes. Game as played. It is the evolution toward self-centeredness, like a party where the hostess keeps interupting conversations to ensure they don't spoil "her mood" that deflates it. I think it is inevitable though given the volume of posts and the little boxes that tend toward trite sayings. How much of the traffic is just "saying" signs? Ok sometimes but after awhile it's like reading a coffee table book for Jonathan Seagull.

Facebook is conversation disco. As a club owner told me decades ago in his club, this music is not about the musicians, it is about the dancers in the audience who earn $100 a week as working schnooks, but can buy cheap polyester and a hair do and go be stars on the dance floor on the weekends. It is about them and if you take that away, they quit buying drinks. Facebook pages about personalities tend to revolve around getting the star's attention. They are suckfests. There is no harm in it but again, not much to be learned.

It happens here and ok, but this site is different in that the Blundernation turned into a community. A lot of these people really are friends. They know each other's kids, they go to each other's houses, take trips together, get together and work on the Church. Some are for all intents, a church community. Not all and some do hide behind anonymous logins, take shots and generally are odious at will. I think that thins the conversations. Again, not much to learn after the first round of posts. On the other hand if someone wants to learn a song, pick up pointers on techniques, or just whine like I am doing, the first bits happen quickly and the second bit is tolerated.

Facebook can be something like that but only if one is very careful about friending. A bit like life, I guess. On the other hand, Facebook is also a listening post for the spooks and if one has security clearances, more than a little dangerous. The counter-intelligence briefings I got emphasized what we already knew: we are being targeted, courted and exploited. So yeah, I'd rather not.

Call me Ishmael.

i am just me.

I rediscovered some long-lost friends and relatives on Facebook. I try to keep it light when I log in, and pretty much don't engage on anything political. I'm not one to use it to dramatize my life. On the whole, more positive than negative but I could imagine shutting it down for a while.

I'll have to practice self-flatulation with the rest of the 'bookers.

Met my wife Marie here in Belgium on it. Old friends and family have connected on it. As long as some of them think about my posts, it worth it. I try to keep it simple, with solutions I see offered. Its a bottom up way out way with me. But seeing the same right and left crap from each side almost makes FB is tiring.

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Too late.