I have three* social media profiles I use regularly. Chances are, you’re reading this on one of them (as opposed to my personal website at www.damonkaswell.com, where this was originally published). They are:

One of these things is not like the others.

LiveJournal is first and foremost a social blogging tool, designed for long posts and detailed, threaded discussions. It is quite possible to have a days-long — or even weeks-long — conversation on LiveJournal.

Google Buzz is the new kid on the block in social media. It integrates with your GMail account and is sort of like if Twitter was a blogging tool. It’s fine for short “status update” posts, but it has a lot of very nice features for blogging, too, and active discussions float to the top of your buzz feed. I’m finding the clutter-free interface and GMail contact integration to be very nice. It wants to stay out of your way. I have my concerns about Google and how embedded it has become in our lives, but that aside, Buzz does a good job for both quick and longer updates.

LiveJournal and Google Buzz appeal to me as a writer. And then there’s Facebook…

Facebook has some perfunctory blogging tools, but by and large it’s intended for posts not much larger than those on Twitter. With a limit of 420 characters on status updates, and blog posts relegated to a sub-page, Facebook is appealing to the ADHD kid in all of us. There are lots of shiny baubles (“Join a group!” “Support this cause!” “Become a fan!”) and quick, easily digested infotainment bits from our friends (or “friends,” as the case may be).

I don’t blog as much as I used to since joining Facebook. It doesn’t reward long, complicated thoughts and detailed analysis the way LiveJournal and Buzz do. It doesn’t reward content. Rather, it rewards bouncing rapidly from one thing to another. I don’t think using it that way is very good for me.

There are other ways in which Facebook has its uses, so long as you reign in the unproductive and unhealthy hyperactivity it incites. It can be a useful contact manager. It’s a good way to impart brief but useful pieces of information to actual friends and family. It even has some fun games, so long as you avoid FarmVille. It is possible to use Facebook in a way that doesn’t reduce your attention span to that of a gnat.

But it’s not easy. Those shiny baubles are very appealing. They’re designed to be, because the longer you spend on Facebook not doing anything, the longer their advertisers have access to some parts of your brain. Kate Yule has an excellent post on some of the evils of Facebook’s advertising model, and you should read it: http://kateyule.livejournal.com/143713.html. In a nutshell, you are the product.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with her, at least on her decision to close her Facebook account. But I’m tempted enough by the idea that I’m instituting a few new rules for myself and its use:

  1. Clean up my news feed. I want nothing from apps, groups, fan pages, etc., unless it’s from one I actually, actively care about and involves one of my real-world interests, such as writing science fiction. Sorry, this also means purging any individual from my news feed I don’t actually know in some way. I want my news feed to be useful to me, and that means family updates, author updates, real-world friend updates, and very little else.
  2. No advertainment. No FarmVille, PetVille, or any other -Ville of any kind. I have friends who’ve invited me to play those, and they’re fun at first, which they’re designed to be, but there’s no end, no final reward, no “you won” from them. They’re designed to be eternal, and to pester you to log in enough that you’ll consider paying real money for the advantage of not needing to. I’m not talking about the games like Scrabble (which is actually quite fun, and can be a vocabulary expander). I’m talking about the ones that very cleverly manipulate you into caring about them, fussing over them… and eventually spending money on them, for no personal gain whatsoever.
  3. Avoid logging in. There are tools available for retrieving your Facebook feed and notices, and displaying them in a clutter- and distraction-free way. From now on, I will use those, and log directly into the page only when needed for some reason.

After thinking about all this, all the work it will take to strip the clutter from my Facebook page and make it a useful information feed, I find myself wondering what took me so long to reach this point.

EDIT: Credit where credit is due. The inestimable David D. Levine got me thinking about this.

*One might wonder about Twitter. I reject any service that restricts my thoughts to 140 characters. If Facebook gives us ADHD, Twitter gives us ADHD and then feeds us a steady diet of sugar.