It is not surprising that maintaining all your social network “friendships” can be a time-exhaustive routine. Just how far can you cultivate an online friendship when there are dozens or hundreds of others waiting in virtual line for your attention?
So what can you one do to escape the pressures and tedium resultng from the desire to have a large group of friends? When you just just can’t take it anymore and have no desire to share your life with all these online acquaintances, one option is to commit what is being termed “Facebook suicide” - or terminating your social networking site.
Although it’s impossible to estimate exactly how many people have “deactivated” (the site has yet to release figures), there are a growing number of Facebook suicide groups on the site. (One, the Facebook Mass Suicide Club, encourages members to “cancel your account before it consumes you. Join this group so we can do it together!” So far, 143 people have joined.)
Phillip Hodson, a fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), says: “Building a Facebook profile is one way that individuals can identify themselves, making them feel important and accepted. But this can lead to disappointment once people realise how insignificant their online existence really is. Not only are online friends not necessarily real friends, they can turn out to be people you don’t wish to know at all. I’m not surprised that those who feel their virtual life is unsatisfying commit online suicide. I really think we make a mistake if we hope to find our collective raison d’être via sites such as Facebook.”
Others have said that they prefer to cultivate their real life friendships and that they realized they needed to get a “real life.” Everything has a life cycle and now we see that the quest and the subsequent time commitment for having multiple virtual friends naturally leads to a desire to step away from the demands and a desire for simplification. It’s not surprising that these suicides are becoming more frequent.
March 13th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
What also has to be realised is tht Facebook doesn’t always lead to people feeling insignificant and just “part of the heard”. I for instance use facebook to keep in touch with my friends I have met physically before virtually. It allows me to keep in touch when people move, go on vacation, or just haven’t been around lately. Facebook allows me to keep cultivating and maintaining my relationships with friends I can physically meet and talk to.