Facebook Clutter?

I've had a love/hate relationship with facebook for years. Call it my paranoid streak, but I don't trust a 20-something with that much personal data.


Still, facebook has given me many happy hours and fun conversations, shared links and photos, messages, etc. For a long time it served its purpose in my life and allowed me to keep up with people.


But this year, I've really hit a weird spot--and I've started to see it as clutter.


Facebook makes a LOT of sense if you truly use it to communicate with people you either frequently see or it becomes a major way of staying in touch with important folks far away. Yet I've noticed that lately, my most important communications are taking place off facebook, and when I really need to hear from someone, it's not done through FB. If I have a need, I need to call or maybe email...FB is not the main way to communicate in my closest circle of friends.


So that means FB is more about lighter connections for me, usually, and those are not connections I need to view every single day. That doesn't mean that my friends' or aquaintances' updates and news are clutter in and of themselves, but with that newsfeed running and running on a daily basis, it's all starting to run together. And it's hard to see what's urgent or important when there's just so much text going and going...it has become clutter. Especially in the visual sense.


I'm sure FB has lots of high-priority information for circles that use it to keep in touch, but for me, on a day when I really need to hear from a friend, my post/update can get lost in the shuffle. A friend recently said to me,  "Oh, if I had seen that you wanted encouragement that day, I would have said something. I must have missed it." As I shared my frustration with a few friends, I started hearing that others too had been a bit hurt of miffed that their comments or photos didn't warrant comments. But, to be fair, we are all so barraged with updates and photos, it is hard to keep up...and the only solution I can think of is to directly reach out to those who we need to connect with--a status update is not guaranteed two-way communication. No one is really obligated to reply as in a real conversation.


I took almost a month off facebook and can tell you it looked the same when I went back--if something urgent or amazing had happened, I wasn't going to find it amidst all the typical newsfeed stuff anyways. I don't know when I'll deactivate again, and I do plan to just delete someday, but the main thing I've learned is that in this phase of my life, facebook is no longer a major "social utility" that I need. I've also heard of people quitting due to similar frustrations as well as freaking out that it was sucking up so much of their time. At least for the visual clutter, perhaps FB needs a feng shui master to consult with them? Maybe that's what the timeline update is going for.


The irony is that if I wanted more action on this blog, I could get it if I posted it on facebook. What a pickle, eh? I'll hold off for a while...it's fun to "live off the grid" and see what happens.