Photo Illustration: Dan McKechnie

Refusing to use Twitter and Facebook for no real reason

Ryan Bromsgrove
Opinion Editor

Feb 01, 2012

I don’t use Twitter or Facebook. And whenever they come up in conversation, it’s vitally important that I make sure everyone knows that I refuse to sign up because I think “social media” is silly.

Look at all you sheep joining the latest internet fads to share with the world all your useless thoughts about your cats and meaningless lives. I’ve got a little newsflash here: nobody cares. You’ll find out soon enough, when we finally reach my arbitrary moving goalpost date of two years from whenever “now” is, when these services will die the same horrible death as Myspace. All social networks die. My sample size is one. More than enough.

Anyhow, after I out myself as one of the few sane ones left, people tell me that they like seeing updates about other people’s cats. I straight up refuse to believe them. Even if true, the fact remains that they shouldn’t like those things — and I know what’s best for them.

Then they pipe up that people use these services to share things that are legitimately interesting: news updates, quickly disseminating information between multiple groups of friends at once, making contacts, sharing event information or live-reporting important things. That’s when I stop listening. Because again, I refuse to believe this, and my pride will never allow me to check for myself if they’re actually anything worth using.

Finally, I recognize the practical arguments for joining these networks, centering around simply reaching a lot of people with your message, but again, I care not. I would rather exhaustingly track people down one by one by phone or in-person than spend less than a minute updating everyone at once on Facebook or Twitter. If we get to this point in the real-life argument, I generally throw my hands up in the air in exasperation and expel a disdainful sigh, indicating that I shall reluctantly shut up — but will retain an air of superiority for the remainder of our time together.

To sum up, when it comes to the purported usefulness of these services I’m personally invested in being willfully ignorant, because it’s part of my identity to think that stuff other people do is frivolous and trivial. I have more important things to do, like living in the past where it’s comfortable and warm.

Back in the old days, if you wanted to talk to a friend you picked up the phone. You didn’t “twitter” at them, you dialed 10 digits and spoke into the devil box. Some people try to characterize me as the same sort of person who resisted the introduction of the telephone, but they’re completely wrong. As I said earlier, Twitter and Facebook are objectively useless, and therefore they will soon shut down. On the other hand, telephones were and are useful, so they have and will stick around.

And when you use the phone, you don’t get advertisers yelling down it at you. I mean look at all those ads on Facebook and Twitter. Do you realize that in exchange for the services they provide at no immediate cost, they take the personal information that you freely give and then show you things that you might be interested in purchasing — and then force you to purchase them? Talk about an invasion of privacy. It’s practically theft.

No, I’ll stay right where I am, thank you very much. Instead of rationally considering what information, if any, about myself I wish to be public in exchange for a method of communication that many find useful, I shall dismiss the concept entirely and stick to my good old reliable telephone line.

Sometimes it just feels like everybody in the world is wrong except me. If only there were a way I could seek out like-minded people and validate my convictions thusly. Alas, all I have is a four-year-old cellphone I bought through Kijiji a few months ago.

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