On 13 August 2009 I deactivated my Facebook social networking account. The world remained on its axis but Facebook’s slightly sinister prediction that my friends would miss me turned out to be correct. A torrent of e-mails and text messages arrived in the days following, asking where I had gone. Many asked me to justify why I left, some out of curiosity and some out of shock. Besides the mundane reasons — such as the ongoing project of limiting procrastination — two substantial arguments developed to explain my deactivation. These relate to voyeurism and the extension of advanced capitalism into the everyday, and are predominantly informed by the work of Zygmunt Bauman and Jean-François Lyotard respectively. In this short essay I will reflect on these themes of voyeurism and what Lyotard calls ‘the inhuman’, sketching out arguments/observations that contributed to my decision to leave Facebook.
David W. Hill (Fri,) studied this question.