Almost two years ago now (it may be closer to a year and a half, but I’m not keeping track), I deleted my accounts at all the social networking sites I belonged to. At that time, Facebook was still only open to college students and corporations (that changed all the way back in Sept. 2006). Friendster was beginning to die its slow painful death, and MySpace was teh hawtness (if I may use a two-year old -or more- slang phrase).

Yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered, one of their contributors talked about abandoning Facebook altogether and how she feels like a Luddite. You can listen to the piece here (it’s only 2 min. long). Granted, she’s 23, so the six-year gap between us probably makes enough of a difference that it’s a much bigger deal for her to be absent from Facebook than it is/was for me. She probably is considered a Luddite by some of her friends (though I daresay they might not be familiar with the word).

Most of my friends continue to plug away at Facebook (and there are a few MySpace hangers on) and communicating with friends that way: e.g. “I’ll just Facebook [name] and see if she is going to be around,” or “I left a message for [name] on Facebook asking him to pick that up for me.”

I don’t operate that way. It seems like a terribly inefficient way to communicate with friends. For quick things like that - send a text message. Your friends always have their cell phones with them. For longer things, send an email (or actually call, if it’s urgent). Leaving a message on Facebook requires your friend to be sitting at their computer/laptop somewhere, logged in (and chances are they’re probably on there all the time, so I have to allow for this difference between myself and 58 million other people) and deal with anything else that might’ve popped up: someone’s annoying post about how drunk they were this weekend or much they love their boyfriend, embedded YouTube video of the newest annoying viral phenomenon, perhaps some invitations to get together at a bar with only 40 or 50 of a person’s other closest friends - and “pokes” (We are how old? Oh, wait, this was created with a slightly younger set in mind).

There’s all this periphery and noise - the ads, the streams of irrelevant info being generated by people you feel compelled to befriend but really don’t need/want to know about beyond their pre-established role in your life… a veritable buffet of empty and useless distraction parading around under the guise of social networking.

“Social” = friendly (and who wants to be seen as unfriendly?) “Networking” = is supposed to provide both the technological element and some aspect of legitimacy? Every high school and college student hears about how important networking is to his/her future. Look! We’ve made it fun (or at least made the buzzwords)! “Social networking.”

While Facebook hasn’t become a complete and utter visual vomitorium like MySpace (which is one nice thing), the framework is the same. Users will want more and more control and the powers that be will slowly grant it - little things, but enough to make people feel like they have some control and prevent them from deserting the site which I feel would happen if they had too much/little control. See also: MySpace. It’s the country club effect, I suppose. Some restrictions give it a sense of exclusivity - “Well, if we can’t limit membership, then at least the standards of dress are being upheld!”

But look at the little fish flakes of freedom - removing the verb from your status update so you’re free to write WHATEVER YOU WANT! This actually made national news under the headline “Facebook users given grammatical freedom.”

I was just getting fed up with all of it (and apparently continue to be) and had a sort of “Burn it all down! Make it clean! PURGE!” moment. It’s just too much clutter - too much info I don’t need, too much involvement with people encroaching upon my personal time, too much time wasted (since it does become a major time suck - I see this in my younger target-age siblings… hours and hours) that could be spent pursuing something that makes you a better, happier, smarter, healthier person. Or sleeping. Sleep is a good use of time, too.

Full disclosure: I should mention I belong to one real social network - LinkedIn, which I sardonically refer to as “networking for networking’s sake”, repeating something a friend wrote when he sent me an invitation. But no one’s posting invitations to parties on that site… yet. I also belong to Last.fm, but do not participate in community features. I only wanted this fun music widget on the right.

I love the technology. What are you reading? Yeah. I stay abreast of social networking for work and general awareness, but I guess I’m just not the target audience for the medium of social networking. I don’t want more involvement with people. I’m a quiet person (believe it or not) who values time alone. I don’t want shallow connections with lots of people. I prefer deeper real connections with fewer people. I vastly prefer a small dinner party with three people and good conversation over a large gathering where the conversation is limited to surface discussions of TV shows, celebrity gossip and who is playing beer pong - and where everything else gets lost in the noise.

And having spent all this time sitting in front of the computer, I’m going to balance it out with an hour of running - which has been doing an OK job of making me a better, happier and healthier person.