10 Reasons Why I am Not On Facebook

A new wave of excitement has come over this blog, as it now has a Facebook page. All thanks to Husband, I must add. I am a self-confessed Luddite. I have had scores of “welcome” to Facebook messages. I actually still receive Facebook invites via email (do people seriously think that I haven’t heard of it??!) and several people assume I am a Facebooker, since I blog and Husband is fairly FB active.

Now I hate to spoil a good party, but I have to be honest here.

I am NOT and never will be, on Facebook!

It’s not that I haven’t tried. I was on it over five years ago, before I had kids, for a few months. I had 306 friends and then I got fed up with it. So I committed Facebook suicide. You would not believe how difficult that actually is. They make it really hard to opt out. But I did. When Facebook went from being a mad craze to being a standard form of communication, I was out of the game. But strangely I never once felt left out. If there was a friends kids I wanted to see, I looked on Husbands account. That was about it.

Since I continually get asked “But Why?”, at the risk of alienating hundreds of people, I have decided to list my reasons;

1) I really don’t have the time. Facebook is one of those things a bit like lost car keys and searching for odd socks, where if you add up the amount of hours you spend faffing about with it, you realise you actually died last Saturday.

2) My family talk a LOT. We are famous for it. I am not kidding there is a lot of madness in the family, and lots of people who like to talk, and if I read everything they post I will, in all likelihood, become mad too (no names – you know who you are).

3) Truth be told once you’ve looked up all your ex-boyfriends and satisfied yourself that your life is better, (at the very least, because they are no longer in it) the rest is all stuff you would hear about anyhow, right?

4) The status thing bugs me. They seem to fall into 2 categories. People who have really fun lives and want me to know all about it “Debra has just come back from 3 really fun parties and she’s getting ready for the next one….” and people who literally write what they are doing, even if nobody would ever want to know “Paul is eating a sandwich”. Give me strength.

5) I’m not actually very technical. So that means people will constantly be telling me that I am not updating my pictures correctly, or that I have to learn Facebook lingo, or g-d forbid, start writing in txt message speak with no vowels or read stuff posted by people under 25 who use shorthand lingo or worse – emoticons (shudder).

6) People often ask me how I manage to stay slim after 3 babies in 4.5 years. Answer; They are all boys, I generally don’t have a car and I AVOID SITTING IN FRONT OF SCREENS. Screen time = non-moving time. It’s not rocket science.

7) A few years ago I worked in a community centre and made the mistake of accepting a friend request from a teenage girl who attended the youth club. I didn’t know her very well but she started sending me weird messages about an older boy and her relationship with him that she would never in a million years have told me in person. At this point I realised that FB is a communication method that can be quite dangerous in the hands of unstable people. Avoid avoid.

8) There are a lot of unstable people out there. (see above)

9) Call me old-fashioned, but I like real face-to-face contact with people. This morning I took some brunch round to a friend who recently had a baby, and another friend who was dropping in some biscuits joined us. It was lovely. Face-to-screen is just not the same. Doesn’t give me the same warm fuzzy feeling.

10) When my kids get old enough to have a Facebook account, there will be a whole new can of worms opened where I can or can’t see what they are writing, and vice versa. Much easier to side-step that one if Mummy is Not on Facebook (although by then I am sure there will be something much more trendy which people of my generation don’t even know how to use).

11) One more for luck; I am a chatty person (I own 2 copies of Little Miss Chatterbox and one of Mr Chatterbox bought for me and annotated by friends and ex-boyfriends over the years). I still write long emails to friends. Facebook is not chatty. It’s not intense real talk. It’s more like a online shul kiddush. Only without the herring. Whats the point?

So there you have it. If you would like to convince me otherwise, I am open to suggestion.

Editors note: Any inaccuracies in current Facebook etiquette, use of online tools or online trends are due to the author living in a cave for the past 5 years!