Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Hyperallergic - Salon.com:

Deleting my Facebook account was a four-day affair. It took me that long to disentangle myself from the service and to let others know how else they could find me. “Disentangling” entailed deleting my photos, “unliking” everything and disconnecting all of the third-party services that used Facebook Connect to log me in. You may have seen these around the web, with the option to “log in with your Facebook account.” The problem is that, to my knowledge, there’s no way to get a list of the sites you’ve accessed with Facebook Connect. The reason these have to be disconnected is because in order to delete your account, you have to be completely logged out for 14 days. If you log in via any means (including Facebook Connect) during that time, you will have to start the process over, and wait another 14 days.

Social media is, in many ways, the mouthpiece for a new “me” generation. For years I’ve worked within this context, trying to find ways to poke at that conception — to subvert and manipulate it. But despite the common refrain that there are evils in all social media services, last week I found myself in a position where my principles overtook my apathy. Specifically, there were two relatively inconsequential things that precipitated my decision to leave Facebook.