I reckon I’m probably going to quit Twitter. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that as I come into the fourth year of my PhD, I need to zone in as much as possible and not have as many distractions.

I don’t doubt that Twitter is useful for some things, but I’ve decided it’s not that useful for me and hence will be one of the first things to go. Facebook statuses do much the same thing anyway.

If the pinch gets worse, I guess other things will have to go too like Blogging, not obsessing so much over Fantasy Football and  possibly even Facebook (shock horror!), when slowly but surely the only website I visit is the LaTeX support site (LaTeX is the typesetting package we use to write Mathematics and it’s not some kind of specialist website for adults).

But really, it doesn’t matter that much, this is just to let folk know why I’ve disappeared, and it’s not because of anything they’ve done!

EDIT I will also change my blogging name from ulsterscot84, for reasons that are too boring to go into.

I signed in and was greeted with this message:

Help translate Facebook into English (UK) so that it can be used by people all over the world, in all languages.

Click on the Translate Facebook button to add the Translations application, developed by Facebook so that you can be part of the community of translators.

Do they really need anyone to “translate” into UK English? Is there actually anything that needs translating?

I think most of us in the “old country” recognise that facebook is American and we accept its foibles with good humor (see what I did there?).

Anyway, I’m hoping to screw it up a bit:

I’ve already sent them a message saying that “X has written on your wall” is written

” What ho old chap, X has defaced your castle. Tally ho!”

as that’s probably how they imagine we all talk anyway. To balance it, I encourage you to do similar things, but perhaps with cockney rhyming slang, geordie or Glaswegian. But to be honest that would really be a complete waste of your time.

So last night I had another weird dream, that if it turned out to be true, world have dire consequences for us all. Anyway, it’s given me a good idea for some of my (in)famous fiction, so at this stage all I will say is that it involves possible, very sinister, origins of a certain website… (but please don’t get too excited, it may be many months before this story shows up…)

I’ve been off facebook for just over a month now, so I thought I would record how I’m coping without it. I have to say things are going pretty well and perhaps I owe a little bit more explanation as to why I joined and subsequently quit it in the first place.

I joined in early 2006, because I was sitting beside Iain Proctor in a lab and he was on it. Upon asking him what this facebook thing was, he didn’t answer and told me to sign up to it to find out (come to think of it, this sounds like he was somehow brainwashed by them to get me to join but that would be paranoid of me in the extreme for me to think that). I promptly joined and watched what was left of my work diligence sail over the horizon. Luckily by then, my project was basically done, so there was no adverse affect there.

What followed, though, was several months of looking at people’s profiles, both people I knew and not (not continuously, or for that long at a time, I hasten to add), groups, walls, a “relationship” with Harrison Gilmore, applications and such, for what seems like now no good reason. Towards the end I started to wonder if I really needed it. Having to remember people’s birthdays again somehow seemed more sincere than posting some cut and paste message as required on someone’s wall, and getting a text message seems all the more personal than getting a wall post that everyone can see.

I started totting things up in my head and looking at the feeble stack of paper on my desk which was this semester’s “work”, wondering how many bytes of data about people I absorbed from facebook and how much work I could do that would be equivalent to that. I absorb data like a sponge- it’s unlikely I will forget the month your birthday or wedding anniversary is in if I’ve bothered to find it out (the exact date is a bit too much) – and I could use it for so much more than knowing what Tom Elswood thinks of Chris Moyles. I started to pray that I might get somehow be freed from its grasp, as it was beginning to affect things it really shouldn’t have affected.

Last month, I saw seven words posted on someone’s wall and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I just didn’t want to know anymore and closed my account (I don’t think I’ll be telling anyone anytime soon what these words were, but even if I told you you would be left with more questions than answers as taken out of context, they make little sense)
, the answer to prayer I was looking for had arrived and it was pretty liberating. Answered prayer is great!

One month on, I feel much better about things. Work is going slowly, but the fact it is going at all is an improvement not to be sniffed at and, if I’m honest, there’s no-one I spoke to there that I can’t contact with a strategic email or text message.

The down sides are that I don’t really have anywhere to put my photos for people to see them (but I may remedy this shortly) and that facebook seems to be the only medium that people invite you to stuff now (even weddings!), but this can be got round by word of mouth, and if people really wanted me to come anyway surely they would tell me?

So really all in all, I’m glad I left, not because of any problems with facebook itself per se, but more because I wasn’t disciplined enough to handle it.

One thing I have realised is how much I used it for personal propaganda- a device to promote myself. Not for any particular reason, but just putting myself out there, saying “this is me, love me!” Not quite in those words, and not to anyone in particular but that seemed to be the way it worked. Such shameless self-promotion has left me, well, ashamed now because there is One who deserves to be promoted much more than me, but I underused it as far as that is concerned. I could go back on it and rectify it I guess, but I think that I would be able to serve much better in these conditions rather than the misery I was in before.

I’ m not trying to pontificate here, but if you find that facebook is taking up too much of your life, then try closing your account for a couple days (you can do this and its easy to get it back) and see how you cope without it, I think you might be pleasantly surprised. But this is just a suggestion as I suspect you can handle it a lot better than I could. I’m probably going to go back on it around my birthday so people can wish me a happy birthday who might have no other means of doing so- but I don’t think I’ll stick around.

Phew, I think that’s my longest blog yet!

EDIT I’m still on bebo. But bebo sucks so that’s ok.

Well I didn’t really conquer, but hey..

So I left facebook and to be honest I feel liberated. Basically, I left because I saw stuff there that I really didn’t want, or need to see (which, if you think about it, is basically everything), not to mention whoreing my time to it for too long (for more on this see Lincoln’s post ) . I may go back, but I am determined not to, not til the summer at the earliest (you may recall I wrote a similar post to this on my previous blog, I didn’t stay away long, though I dearly wish I did).

This isn’t the first time I’ve quit: in April I took the Easter weekend “off” and then a couple of days in the summer, sometime between my birthday and July 23rd. I liked being away- it was sort of like when you go abroad on holiday and come back home to a big pile of post in your letterbox in the form of the news feed, but the desire to be”in the loop” was too great to ignore. Now, though, I really don’t care about being in “the loop” and will be out of it for a while at least. I will come back though, but until then I shall enjoy my freedom.