Cutting The Cord, a.k.a Why I Deactivated My Facebook Account

Part of writing these days, if you want to make any sort of career out of it, involves promotion. Self-promotion. The kind of promotion I hate. I’d rather tell you little stories here and there, drop a few witty lines from time to time, and then fade away into the background until the next brilliant story/thought/line occurs to me.

Unfortunately, that’s not the way things are done in today’s social media run world. If you’re a writer, you have to have an online presence. Twitter. Instagram, Facebook. That kind of crap.

I tried Twitter. It was awful. I’d spend an hour a day scrolling through tweets and liking the funny ones (of which, admittedly, there were not many), and the rest of my day was spent trying to come up with something funny and thought provoking – boiled down to a hundred forty characters.

Coming up with stuff to tweet wasn’t difficult. But boy, narrowing it down to a hundred forty characters sure was. I can’t tell you the number of times I had to scrap a thought or comment because I couldn’t reduce it down. And if I cut corners and removed a word or punctuation? Ugh.

I’m still haunted by that time I substituted “&” for “and” in order to make the line fit.

Twitter was a colossal waste of time. I liken Twitter to a bunch of people standing on a crowded stage, all yelling out one-liners at the same time and hoping the audience, as well as the people around them, hear it and laugh. Everyone’s talking and very few are listening.

I would tweet something I thought was hilarious, and it would drift away into the Internet void with nary a notice or acknowledgment. Then I’d tweet something ordinary like, “Had steak for dinner,” and I’d get all kinds of likes and retweets. Mostly, I would stare at the tweets and think, “Why am I reading these when I’ve got a ton of books in my TBR pile?”

At one point, I had seven hundred Twitter followers. Which is not a lot, I know, but still…

I had a book coming out and I talked it up on Twitter. Not in an obnoxious way or anything. I mean, I didn’t bombard people with the same tweet over and over again like many of my fellow authors seemed to do. Just once in a while, I’d mention the book. Talk about the plot. Add a link here and there.

Then the book came out. Out of seven hundred followers, the number of people who bought my book? Zero.

That’s when I knew it was time to deep-six the Twitter account.

Instagram? Yeah, I don’t get it. Tried it for a few weeks, but I couldn’t fake the enthusiasm for it. Hashtags and pictures? Not for me.

For various reasons, Facebook is the last to go. Too much negativity. Too much politics. Too much hatred and anger. But it’s more than that:

It’s the two hacking attempts I’ve had.

It’s the friend requests from overseas that if I accept, I get middle of the night messages of “Hi,” “Good morning,” “Can I ask you something? R U single?”

It’s accepting a friend request and then that person immediately adding me to a group I have no interest in.

It’s being bombarded by spam posts.

It’s seeing writers I once semi-admired suddenly make racist, bigoted, or stupefyingly ignorant comments. On the one hand, I appreciate seeing their true self come out so I no longer blindly support them, especially when there are so many more decent people out there I’d rather give my hard-earned bucks to. On the other…it’s kind of heartbreaking. (More on this subject in a future post.)

It’s Facebook suddenly hitting me with ads for things that I just happened to have discussed with someone in person when my FB app wasn’t even on and my phone was in my pocket. But Facebook claims they don’t listen in to private conversations, so it all must be a coincidence, right? (Yeah, right.)

It’s someone I’m dating (not currently) keeping track of who is liking or commenting on my posts, then asking, “Who’s this woman?” My usual answer of, “I don’t know. Someone I’m friends with on Facebook,” was usually met with, “Well, she seems to like an awful lot of your posts.” (Truthfully, my exes knew more about the people who liked, commented, and/or responded to my posts than I did.)

It’s all of the things listed above, and probably a dozen more. Long story short (too late, I know), I knew it was time to deactivate the account a while ago.

From now on, if I have anything to say, I’ll say it here. It might be funny, or it might be serious. It might be a paragraph, or a long treatise. It might be a review. It might be a joke. It might be anything.

But it won’t be on Facebook.