Untangling knots and threads

There are certainly many reasons to leave facebook. Cat videos might be one of them, and yes, I admit that I have wasted many hours since I established my first profile "back then in the 2000s", watching cats driving around on vacuum cleaner robots, looking at unknown toddlers in other people's homes fighting with spaghetti piles, and admiring policeman saving ducklings from death.

Hate speech is another one. And the garbage you voluntarily pour over your head reading some posts and comments, while cute words like "friend", "share" and "like" have become part of our digital identities in a lavish way. Trying to save social media from hate speech I have been a member of the #ichbinhier community for some time, so I know what I am talking about.

To me, focus and gaining back control is another one. One of my 2019 resolutions is to re-focus on a limited number of communication channels, and "quit facebook" has been on my "someday, maybe"-list for a long time.

A four hour train trip to Munich, it’s raining outside. WIFI working. Ok, let’s tackle this. Today. Some preparation has been made already, my uploaded files and pictures have been deleted already. The plan is not only to delete the account, which might be easy, but to carefully go through all the digital traces I have left and which are still accessible to my command before I’ll do the final "click". Group memberships. Movie likes. Events, even comments. And of course: my contacts. Friends, as FB calls them.

I have a rough number of 180 facebook friends. Compared to some profiles out there, and even to my own ones on XING or LinkedIn, where my policy with accepting invites is very different, this is not a lot. Compared to "real world contacts possible in my weekly sparetime being a working parent", this is an overwhelming number. Where have all these people come from!?

I start by sorting my contacts into buckets. First, there is a large category of what I simply call "history". It’s covering quite a number of people, basically former school mates and university friends. How great it felt when we first re-connected on the net some years ago! Wow, this is Michael today. Oh, and look at Claudia and her beautiful children! How sweet! The family living next door when I was a child. Some international friends I met during the four years I took part in an American-European training programme my school was part of. And some other, like my old aupair friend who I found here after a more than 12 year gap of communicating. We had both moved to new places, phone numbers had changed and email was not an option when we last met in 1997. But our names stayed the same – so when facebook came, it was easy to find her. When I finally rang at my friends door after all that time, re-united by an at that time very social network, we both burst into tears.

What I do with all these connections in my history bucket: Again, I divide them into "people I just connected to because I found their profile on FB and thought this is the way it should be done at that time" and the ones I really am glad to be connected to today. Regarding the first group: I am connected to people I haven’t really been close to during the time we studied, why would I make him or her a "friend" today? Delete. "Unfriend". Sounds very rude and I have to remind myself, that this is exactly what facebook wants me to: feel bad when unconnecting someone virtually while our connection would feed the company with yet another real dollar.

133 contacts left.

The other ones in the history bucket are the dear ones, like my aupair friend: I write individual messages to everyone of them, including my private email address if I am not sure if he or her has it, and my current phone number, adding the wish to stay in touch. Plus, I do a quick check in my phone contacts, whether I do have other details. For 80%, the answer is yes. From the other ones, I am receiving email answers quickly. And guess what: everybody tells me, what a good idea that was.

Number of contacts down to: 101

Next bucket is colleagues, even former ones. They pretty much reflect my own social media history. Those were the days when I connected to everyone I knew, it just felt right to include colleagues. Facebook was cool, and why not share little personal notes with those who you spend so much time with at work. This is the easiest group. All of them are on either XING or LinkedIn and we are connected there, too. I delete them all at once.

78 friends left.

The train is close to Nuremberg – one hour trip left to Munich. The largest bucket is my tapdance network. Tap dance and the tapping community are very international. The great thing with FB is that you can not only stay in touch and know people’s name the next time you meet them in class, but also share events and workshop dates, ?like“ little performance videos, music pieces, share accomodation requests for workshops in other cities and even ask the community to jam in the park in city xyz that very day. To release these knots means work, because it affects the way I have been pursuing my hobby during the last 10 years. This is something I often hear when I talk to other people in the same situation. ?I’d really like to leave facebook (twitter, instagram). But I cannot. Everything concerning xyz (just replace tapdance by e.g. ?squirrel observation community‘) is organized here“. Well, I believe you can. It’s just more work than you imagined when you signed in. So again: Messages with my contact details to those I’d like to stay in touch with. Messages and requests to be added to email newsletters to everyone who is teaching tap. A sigh and a sorry for all the little videos I’ll miss. I put a note into my calendar ?check 2019 tap websites for festivals, concerts and workshops“.

Half of my contacts go away, 33 left.

And then: there comes this category of family, friends and neighbours. Real life people. Dear contacts, I love to have their pictures in my pocket on my phone. For these people, the word ?friend“ makes sense. It is the people I trust and have been knowing for a long time. People who know my history, my children, my house. People who would not post birthday wishes on my wall but come to my place and bring flowers. Or do a phone call. Or even, some of them, send a handwritten birthday card. You might think, they are the most difficult ones to ?unfriend“. The opposite is true – I am not even telling them. Maybe when we have our next chat at another friend’s party, I’ll drop something like ?by the way, I left facebook“. It won’t hurt their feelings. I am sure.

0 contacts left.

Entering Munich by train, 10 minutes before our scheduled time, a humorous comment by the train attendant on the loud speakers. A quick phone call to the friends who I’ll pay a visit that I have arrived safe besides snow and that I’ll immediately continue to their place. It’s snowing outside, and later on, we enjoy a glas of wine together. There’s a lot to chat about, we haven’t met for months. Not even on the net. My friends never had profiles there anyway.

MD 25/01/2019

This is a shorter version and translation of my latest blogpost "Vom Knoten l?sen und F?den entwirren", published Jan 25/2019 on www.soundof.work