Robert W. Gehl's "'Why I Left Facebook'" (from Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch's "Unlike Us Reader" [Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2013)]) offers a mini-ethnography of English-language 'Why I Left Facebook' posts.
Inpsired by Gehl, this page summarizes a class project (PHIL 123, "Internet, Society, & Philosophy", University of Oregon, Winter 2014; Prof. Colin Koopman) that involved a short exercise in meditating on the virtues and vices of leaving Facebook behind and staying on Facebook.
Participants were asked to imagine that they had decided to leave Facebook. What would they tell people? What would they write to all their 'friends' to explain their decision? Why were they going.
Read their 45 accounts of 'why I left facebook'
Participants where then asked to imagine that they had decided to stay on Facebook. Why were the staying? What was it that was keeping them on Facebook? Why do they like Facebook? What do they use it for? Why do the want to keep it a part of their lives?
Read their 45 acounts of 'why I stayed on facebook'
All participants have been anonymized, so that they could speak freely in discussing their reasons for staying and going.
Gehl concludes his article with this call: "We have to 'pick up our game' in the face of the increased production of ideas" (235). Undoubtedly this is true. One place to start is to ask yourself, and your students, 'Why am I staying on Facebook?' and 'Why am I leaving?'. Those of us on Facebook rarely ask this question. We just use it. We do it. Here we confront new media turned habitual (to anticipate the vocabulary of Wendy Chun's next book). Here we confront our most uncritical selves. The point is not to convince everyone to leave Facebook. The point, rather, is to convince those who stay to reflexively interrogate why they are staying. Facebook should be a choice we make, not a habit we lurch forward in. The habitualization of technology is the deadening of democratic engagement, or what Langdon Winner once described as "citizen virtues in a technological order"
Inspired by Robert W. Gehl's "'Why I Left Facebook'" this class project was a short exercise in meditating on the virtues and vices of leaving Facebook behind and staying on Facebook.