Facebook Sanity Rules

In my eyes facebook is the plague that eats at the core of inter-human relationships. The diluter of real connections and the extinguisher of personal boundaries. The replacer of real life interactions for artificial ones and the enabler of “friends“ rush. The remover of friendship context and the judge of skewed relationship affinity.

With this type of introduction one might not expect this, but I do have a Facebook account. My reasons are not the subject of this discussion but I’ve planed to further expand on the issue at a later time. I have to use Facebook so, to alleviate my experience and to remain sane, I’ve established some ground rules.

A maximum of 25 friends. The number is large enough to incorporate all of my friends, and it is small enough to keep the meaning of the word friend. Plus, it seems I can keep up with all the important activity without being swamped by it. When the limit is reached and I want to create a new connection, somebody will be removed.

Never friend somebody. Only other people will add me. It may sound arrogant but it’s just a trick to make my life easier. They select the relationship, I judge it. This makes the enforcement of the previous rule more straightforward.

You must be a friend in the real world. We must have met for a drink at least in the last 4 weeks prior to your friendship request. If we are not interacting frequently, we don’t care about each other. Exceptions will be made for family members and select lifetime friends.

My friends must be people. It may seem like a social networking website should only be for humans, but Facebook is not. Companies, organizations, pets, infants and even body parts have an account. None of those will have my attention.

Keep the overlords in darkness as much as possible. Facebook earns money by selling our personal information to advertisers. I don’t want to be used like that; this is why I don’t add anything in my personal profile: no bio, no pictures, no favorite books or music, not a single thing. I keep all the privacy settings at paranoid level. I only vote or comment on things my friends shared and I never use facebook apps. I don’t let facebook track my browsing activities with the help of browser extensions. It seems excessive, but if you are my friend you already know most of that stuff about me; no need for Facebook to know it too.

It’s not me, it’s not you, it’s this social networking age we are living in.