Joanna Weiss February 11, 2013
This is a milestone in our growing relationship with social media.
Forget about the privacy concerns, the onslaught of ads, the annoying design of your profile page. If people are slowly turning away from Facebook, it's not because the company has overreached or gone over to the dark side. It's because we've come to realise that people are boring.
Surely you've noticed this, as you've scrolled through updates about holidays and restaurant meals, plus notices about how many of your friends are playing Candy Crush Saga.
A survey released last week by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 61 per cent of Facebook users have taken a ''Facebook vacation'', for reasons that had little to do with how the company behaves. ''Too busy'' was the most common complaint, followed by ''just wasn't interested'' and ''it was a waste of time''.
''It's a reckoning moment,'' said Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew project. ''People are making little mental calculations about how much time do I want to devote to this, what's the quality of the material I get from my friends?''
This is, in some ways, a milestone in our growing relationship with social media. Early complaints about Facebook centred on the fact that interactions were fake: hand-picked, over glossed, idealised personal statements that were bound to make your friends feel insecure, and vice versa. But now that we're all familiar with the Facebook mask, the problem might be that our posts are too real, and that reality isn't worth our time.
Earnest efforts to promote unplugging, such as the annual Screen Free Week, are gaining traction, and Facebook's policies have done their part to diminish our trust, but it turns out that our own inanity is also a powerful force.
Not that it's time to fear for Mark Zuckerberg's welfare. Facebook is used by a mind-boggling number of people around the globe, including your mother, your father, your great-aunt Hilda, and your long-lost friend from high school with a political vendetta. The fact we're now settling into a mature routine is actually a sign of how intertwined our lives are with our feeds - and how much we feel obliged to take part.
As much as I grumble, after all, I still feel compelled to dip into the Facebook universe every few days, posting photos of depressingly minor life events - Attention, world! My child went to the dentist! - or scrolling down the news feed and ''liking'' 15 items in one sitting. I'm marking my presence, like a dog. If I lay off the site for a few days, I invariably miss six birthdays and feel like a jerk. If I stay away for longer, I worry I'll miss big news.
Every new medium eventually finds its purpose. Twitter works well as a news aggregator and wisecrack-sharing platform. Pinterest is a gallery for home decor ideas. Facebook has become the accepted repository for information about births, deaths and traumatic family events. It's also reasonably good for mobilising social movements and conducting virtual garage sales.
For photos of children and holidays? Well, there's this nifty thing called paper. A few weeks ago, we finally took down our display of holiday cards, those cheery family photos that Facebook should have rendered obsolete. They still feel more valuable than the average digital post, precisely because they're worth the cost of bulk printing and a stamp, and because they require the physical act of opening an envelope.
Holiday cards are one of the last remaining things that we still instinctively send by mail, along with thank-you notes and the occasional party invitation.
Right after the Pew Facebook study came out, the US Postal Service announced that it was dropping Saturday delivery, prompting a flood of lamentations - on social media, of course - from people who may not have written a letter by hand in years.
I'm an American and I, too, will miss the weekend mail, but it's hard to argue with reality. The other day, the sum total of my mail was an electricity bill and a flyer from Costco.
If someone sent you a snail-mail photo of his kids every day or every week, you'd think he suffered from a personality disorder. But holiday cards can be an annual thrill, precisely because they come once a year. Looking for a new, Facebook 2.0 standard for how much we ought to share? It turns out, we might have had it all along.
Joanna Weiss is a columnist with The Boston Globe.
