MANILA, Philippines - I’m 25 years old, and I am nowhere to be found on anyone’s online list of friends. That’s right: I’m not on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Instagram. And I still use Yahoo Mail.
Whenever I tell this to someone, they get this look of bewilderment on their faces or stare at me blankly. A friend says that I’m “stuck in 1999.” It’s hilarious.
But I’m not a freak. In fact, there are many people out there like me. Just because we don’t Instagram what we eat, tweet when we sh*t, and reblog posts while we’re sh*tting, does not mean we don’t exist.
So, to you citizens of Twitterverse, get away from your screens for a second and get to know us a bit more. We might teach you a thing or two about life; about building strong relationships in person, and expressing feelings through touch instead of touch screens.
There are four types of cyber hermits. Let’s take a closer look at who these online holdouts really are.
The Busy Misanthrope
“Wow, so many people I don’t care about!”
If you’re not too fond of people, chances are you’ll stick to close friends and like minds. Social networks don’t work that way. Eventually, every user runs into some bad memories, creeps, enemies, or people they secretly dislike. For The Busy Misanthrope, well, that’s a lot of people. Google+ now lets you quarantine those you confirmed just to be polite, but it certainly isn’t the solution for everyone. When you think about it, how many of those 550 “friends” do you really talk to, anyway?
Clearly, anyone that resistant to Facebook must be preoccupied with a thing or two of their own. Watching as the whole world posts, tags and tweets, they whisper to themselves, “Who’s got the time to go through all that?” But as aloof as they seem, they’re equally as loyal to their inner circle and just as informed when it comes to how the online world works, if not more so.
Let’s just hope these guys don’t take up virus coding as a hobby.
The Snobbish Hipster
“Facebook is for great-grandparents and Bieber fever fatalities. You do know that you’re just handing personal information over to capitalist pigs and their evil corporations, right? Occupy the Internet!”
The Snobbish Hipster has grown annoyed at the pace by which the masses have overrun most social networking sites. During the glory days of Friendster and MySpace, both these sites amassed millions of ridiculous profiles featuring fakes, spammers, and tacky layouts. While Facebook rejected the sparkly fonts and handled different profile types well, the experience began to change as the site grew more accessible and more popular. Suddenly, you’ve got friends asking you to help them grow carrots on a farm and join a group whose sole purpose is to reach 10 million members. Sometimes the person asking is your dad.
It’s also widely known that information you put on a site like Facebook can be used for profit, targeted ads being the often cited, more benign example. But with Facebook’s plugins and Google’s integrated services, there’s more about you out there than ever before. Knowing that, what could be more ironic and nonconformist in this day and age than staying off these sites?
You’re more likely to find these folks and their discerning tastes on communities such as Diaspora and various forums. “Di—? What?” Exactly.
The Cybersuicide Survivor
“I went home, and, deciding I did not want anything to do with the sick, social world anymore, I grabbed my laptop and clicked myself. I mean, killed myself. Online. … Social networks are for show-offs, anyway.” — Name withheld
Think you’re above unfriending someone in a fit of rage? What about unfriending en masse? The act of doing so is seldom random; someone who’s had a wonderful day doesn’t turn to you to announce that they’ve decided to declutter their list of contacts. Consider how it would feel scrolling through a wicked ex’s steady stream of updates about her oh-so-spectacular Friday nights. Perhaps unfriending said ex and a gang of screeching harpies feels insufficient somehow, so between tone-deaf Dan’s YouTube covers and plastic Lisa’s Tumblr posts on fashion, it might simply be time to hang the proverbial noose.
And yet The Cybersuicide Survivor is precisely that — a survivor — because out of disconnectedness sprout forth potentially profound realizations. Like a ghost looking out at the world, a life post-cybersuicide often sparks welcome contemplation. Even if you quit Facebook just because you couldn’t untag those fug photos of yourself fast enough.
Pro tip: Use the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine and watch your virtual life flash right before your eyes!
The Unintended Stalker
“@UnintendedStalker hasn’t tweeted yet.”
Okay, so they’re actually on the site. Still, that’s about all you’ll find on their pages and yet they seem to be following everyone. All-but-empty profiles are generally a) true cyberstalkers or b) forced sign-ups, who folded under peer pressure but have no real desire to participate. Sounds pitiful, but they’re the ones now sitting behind a virtual one-way mirror within the social network, so I’ll leave it at that.
Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg said it best on The Facebook Blog when he wrote: “And we agree, stalking isn’t cool; but being able to know what’s going on in your friends’ lives is.”
Yes. We agree, Mark. And we also agree that that was taken completely out of context.
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So which one am I? I’m really a little bit of each one, which is likely what most of us not on social networking sites are, too. We’ll argue that you can build strong relationships without these sites and that it doesn’t mean becoming an ignorant technophobe. Personally, I am in no way anti-Facebook; I actually think it’s wonderful. But like anything else, it has its pros and cons and just isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea.