Facebook comes with baggage and is fraught with expectation. The whole air surrounding Facebook is one charged with emotion, as the complexities of interaction and identity are watered down to a few drop down selections. In my experience, the complexity of communication as well as the need for clarification goes up. This can be observed in the application of terminologies like “like” and “friend”, the perceived simplicity of black and white selected states just leads to more ambiguity. In the analog world saying “you like something” has only one meaning, when on Facebook the convention applied to the “like” button has a much broader meaning.

“Friending” is it’s own bag of marbles. Not “Friending” or “Unfriending” a friend on Facebook can defiantly send mixed message. An “Unfriended” friend may be insulted, offended, or even hurt, perceiving a correlation with friendship in the offline world. While it could be a sign your friendship is waning, it could just as easily mean you just don’t want your feed clogged with: information you easily can or do get offline, or automated post made by apps, or any of the other dozens of reasons that have nothing to do with honest to goodness friendship. Online actions could lead to the need for offline clarifications. Time spent clarifying or repairing hurt friendships is time that could have been spent, just hanging out, having fun, or just growing closer. And, well, “friending” or “not friending” family adds it’s own dimension of fresh hell to all this.

I don’t really have too much of a gripe with any of this; after all, every form of communication has it’s strengths and weaknesses. But, the complexity and the type of friction added by using Facebook is a huge turn off for me. I turned to twitter because it’s largely neutral, following someone’s feed carries far different connotations than “Friending”. My only thought when I choose to follow someone is “Do I find their feed interesting?”, not “How will they feel if I follow or don’t follow them?”. Similarly, since twitter is public by nature, the only though I have when posting is “Is it ok if what I’m about to post goes public?”, not “Did I correctly set my up privacy settings, groups, and whatnot?” With Twitter, my focus and attention is freed up to think about what I’m posting, rather than the baggage that comes along with using the social network.

And for anything I need more than 140 characters to express, I have Cheesed-Off.