Table of Contents
(100 Days to offload Day 3)
The other evening I watched the film the Social Dilemma on Netflix on the recommendation of a buddy.
The film talks about social media - Facebook and Instagram, but also Google and youtube, and any software with an algorithm that gathers data and tries to serve up the content that is most alluring to the individual user. That means the most emotionally engaging, provocative or inflammatory content is likely to be presented, fueling polarization and targeting people based on data gathered, with wildly differing information and interpretations of the world we live in. It's enlightening and disturbing. If you haven't seen it, I recommend it. It makes me very interested in disconnecting myself from those kinds of systems. I don't want to fuel them or be influenced by them.
While I am a privacy-minded Linux aficionado, I still Use Google for some things and have Instagram and Facebook and Reddit accounts. I don't use them much but I'm not proud that they are still there.
Rather than being some sort of absolutist, I am going to list my accounts and break down their use and how I am attempting to manage them. I am aiming for a Cal Newport style digital minimalism, where things serve a purpose, but don't pull me away from a sense of focus.
I'm not talking about phone apps because I haven't had social media apps on my phone for years.
Facebook is pretty terrible. I only keep this account for Facebook marketplace, and a bit of local mom networking, and the off chance that a family member I haven't talked to in years wants to look me up.
A while back, Facebook changed settings so they were inserting historical photos into the feed, and I couldn't get rid of them. Some of them were sad or upsetting. I sure don't need extra exposure to upsetting stuff that I didn't ask for! So I installed a firefox extension that removes the home feed altogether, replacing it with a tiny quote. So now if I go to Facebook, I see a mostly blank page, and I can select the marketplace or moms group directly. It is nice that because FB has become so unpleasant, I don't feel I am missing out on anything. I would like to delete the account entirely but those few functions are actually useful and I don't have another way to access them.
I do have the Firefox extension Facebook Container installed, which hopefully keeps Facebook from tracking my data so much.
