I wish I could quit you!
I totally don't even know what that title refers to specifically; I've never even seen the movie. Is it something about gay sex? In this case, however, I wish it to refer to Facebook and intend the sentiments to be taken not as my own, but as those of a bunch of whiners who came up with something called Quit Facebook Day. I know, right? Pretty lame. If somebody can't stay off Facebook for just one day—Memorial Day, no less!—they've got problems. What's that? The site is actually about deleting your account over privacy concerns? Well, that's lame too.
Obviously, it's a little disconcerting that your Facebook login info—and all your friends' info, too—now follows you all around the internet, thanks to Facebook Connect or whatever it is that puts those little "Like this" buttons on the bottom of thousands of stupid articles and web pages. But privacy? I hate to tell you folks, but when you make an update on Facebook the little button you push to send it in is labeled "Share". And as anyone with any sense knows, when you share anything on the internet you need to consider it public property, because one way or another it will be. If it's any interesting, of course. If it's not, nobody will care. And as far as data security goes, you get what you pay for when you're relying on a free third-party site to manage your internet presence. You want to control your own settings? Get your own hosting!
Perhaps my lack of concern means that I don't fully understand what Facebook—or indeed "social networking" in general—is really about. I don't, contra the assumptions of the quitfacebookday.com folks, find it at all "engaging, enjoyable and quite frankly, addictive". Oh-for-three! It is a way to connect with friends and coworkers with whom I would otherwise not communicate, but since I'm not going to share anything with those folks that I wouldn't want getting out to a wider audience, I'm not bothered about privacy. Or maybe I don't care because I don't see the wider plot afoot, as spotted by a commenter a Wired article about the whole to-do:
Mark Zuckerberg is a Jew and so is [Wired writer] Fred Vogelstein. Convenient isn’t it, how a group comprising 1% of American society seems to always coincidentally prop up its weak and stupid members? The Jews are always looking out for each other, and ONLY each other. Fellow Americans, you have to watch the Jews very, very closely, and question them at every turn, or else they will take everything from you.
Ohh-kay.... I'm going to read that as trolling satire and walk away.
Anyways, reading all the articles published this weekend about the affair, one thing (from a PCWorld article) made me laugh:
The organizers of "Quit Facebook Day," Joseph Dee and Matthew Milan, both of Toronto, couldn't be reached for comment.
Well sure, no one could get in touch with them: they're not on Facebook!