Tag Archives: facebook

Deleting Facebook and Twitter at 38

February 10, 2025personalfacebook, social media, TwitterHarry Underwood

I turned 38 on February 5.

I have had a Facebook account since November 2005, which I created while I was a freshman at Oglethorpe University, when college classmates were encouraging each other to create a Facebook profile to converse with each other, back when smartphones weren’t a thing yet, back when most computers on campus were connected using DSL.

In 2016-2017, I deactivated that account, in which so many of the “friends” from earlier in my life, from Warner Robins and Macon State and Oglethorpe were not too keen on my increasingly “political” posts, and created this account.

What has transpired over the last month should not have been the impetus for me to do this, and I know that I should have done this years ago.

I am now about to delete this account, that previous account, and maybe two other accounts. Not merely deactivate, but delete them entirely. No more of me on here.

This month, I’ve marked three Twitter accounts, two Instagram, two Threads, and four Facebook profiles for deletion, which should finish by the beginning of March.

This will be a new experience for me. Taking greater charge of the data I write about myself, of downloading and backing up what I can take, even of deleting what Facebook won’t let me download (i.e., group posts). I’ve spent some of this week deleting groups and pages I’ve created over the years, and there were several of them, at least until Facebook ran into “problems” with deleting groups of which I am admin.

The last year has shown me a bit about what and who I will have to cut myself off from, with what and whom I have to burn bridges and live without. And now, so are many of you. Funny how that works.

And Facebook has long shown its age, and its demographic is aging hard. So has Twitter.

So I will no longer age with them, and vice versa. Separately, but not together.

None of you have to age with a centralized silo like this, one which keeps so much of your data and connections hostage.

This is an act of one taking more control over their life, one with potential ramifications for one’s future as a human being but which can also slowly free oneself from what someone once called “poaster’s madness” (yes, they spelled it “poaster’s” with an “a”).

This is not a heroic thing to do. This is the least I should do at this moment. This is basic mental health in a time when madness is rewarded with misguided catharsis, a time which I am sure will get worse before a (dis)proportionate reaction comes around.

I apologize to the 1.4k Facebook friends I had from my recent profile, to the many more friends I made along the way, as well as to the many political individuals whom I first met over Facebook since 2005.

I also apologize to many of my college friends, of whom I made far more through Middle Georgia State (formerly Macon State) and the Warner Robins campus of Central Georgia Tech (formerly Middle Georgia Tech). I also apologize to those who I’ve made through the odd jobs I’ve done for them: candidate and issue campaigns, website design, and more.

Erasing Oneself from the Narrative

I feel that healing the rot caused by the roots of the housing supply crisis, which social media silos like Facebook and Twitter have only inflamed, is a mass, interpersonal struggle, not merely a personal trifle.

Wresting control over one’s attention and self-awareness away from car-brain and (for-profit) social media brain is crucial for where we end up next in our politics.

I see both of these mentalities emanating from the same alienating, atomizing root, in which one can live in the “wealthiest, most powerful nation-state in the history of the human species”(™) and find oneself increasingly isolated in exurbs and isolated alongside 3 billion others on Facebook.

And we wonder why radicalization toward misanthropic, illiberal politics has increased in purchase.

But if the single-family, car-centric zoning of housing is a crisis facilitated by its design toward consumption of land, can that be linked to the design of not only the social media algorithms feeding posts and ads to users’ eyeballs, but also the functional design of continuous scrolling?

It is time to allow ourselves to densify our housing and build inward, build more apartments closer to public transit, build more public transit, build away from the Sunbelt, and build away from wildland-urban interfaces.

Similarly, it is time to choose media which respects our autonomy and right to self-moderate, respects our attention and does not continually feed us more content without our deliberation, allows us to retain and relocate our data and identity, allows us more control in how we wish to present ourselves, allows us to seek more consensus rather than contention in the projection of reality, allows us to refuse a platform to the misanthropic.

The status quo that we have right now does none of those things.

Therefore, as I have fed into this status quo for nearly 20 years of my life, as part of the West Coast burns, as the federal administrative state is set on fire from inside the White House, I erase myself from this narrative. I deny this beast any more of what I’ve fed it, and reclaim my time. I begin the healing process which I’ve denied myself all of these years. And I will try to actually blog long-form more often.

Dear reader, I hope you do, too.

I am now thinking frequently about these lyrics from Philippa Soo’s performance as Eliza in Hamilton:

“I’m erasing myself from the narrative

Let future historians wonder

How Eliza reacted when you broke her heart

You have torn it all apart

I’m watching it

Burn

Watching it burn

The world has no right to my heart

The world has no place in our bed

They don’t get to know what I said

I’m burning the memories

Burning the letters that might have redeemed you

You forfeit all rights to my heart

You forfeit the place in our bed

You sleep in your office instead

With only the memories

Of when you were mine

I hope that you burn”

I’m FB-friends with so many movers and shakers, people with interesting opinions, people who I haven’t met yet but might someday, people who are new to the structure and layout of politics, people who are (or will be, or have long been) present at the tables of power but not letting it get to your heads, friends who don’t even like my other friends (or me?) due to seemingly-minor political differences and beefs, people who’ve employed or worked with me in multiple campaigns or have yet to do so.

And all at a time and situation like this.

I don’t know what will happen in the coming weeks or months. I don’t know if I’m ready to see all of this play out, or the mess that we’ll end up having to clean up. I’ll have to be part of a generation which experienced early adulthood under such a regime as this, and we may not see anything like this for decades afterward.

I still feel young to all of this, like I’m not able to walk in shoes of any of your sizes.

But I’m glad to be connecting with ya’ll, whenever or wherever it matters.

#vent

February 9, 2015UncategorizedfacebookHarry Underwood

So I pissed off a guy in Morrow, GA under a 13WMAZ.com thread. He messages me to burn in Hell because I don’t believe in Jesus. He wants me to justify his e-thug. Calls me a bitch. I’m laughing at him and calling him a punk. He wants to meet me and tell me what he thinks of me. He blocks my messages. He’s shit at Text English. #DontStartNone, Kenny Evans.

Drag Performance, Brand Pages and Personal Identities

October 10, 2014LGBT, Tech, To Exportfacebook, fb, g+, google plus, google+, lgbt, social networking, technologyHarry Underwood

The issue of the “Real Name” policy, whereby users are told to use “real” names (not necessarily actual names, but “real-sounding” names), is problematic for social networking services (SNS). It’s especially problematic when SNS operators refer users to use brand pages – profiles which are maintained and moderated corporately by one or more users for organized purposes such as promoting a brand or a movement – as alternatives to using pseudonyms on their personal profiles. The reason is that such a solution is half-baked on the sites which most emphasize the use of “real names” for users’ profiles, particularly Facebook (and formerly Google+).

Functionality issues

The suggestion by Facebook for preferably-pseudonymous users to use their pseudonyms on brand pages ignores the fact that pages on Facebook offer less interactivity than personal profiles. Facebook pages don’t allow pages – which are built to serve organizations rather than pseudonymous personalities – to form or join groups. In relation to this, Facebook also does not allow brand pages to automatically invite other users to events; compare this to Facebook groups, which allow for automatic invitations of all members to event pages.

Google+ Pages, in comparison, offer a bit more interaction, with the ability to create and join “communities” (equivalent to groups) as your brand page. In addition, G+ Pages can also add user profiles to circles (a more advanced version of Facebook’s “adding friends”) and invite followed profiles, circles of profiles and whole communities to events.

Presentation issues

However, in the case of pseudonymous users being “nudged” to create pages for their pseudonyms, G+ and Facebook both suffer from a high learning curve and a lack of tailoring toward personal identity pseudonyms.

Facebook’s “Create a Page” has six main options: “Local Business or Place”, “Company, Organization or Institution”, “Brand or Product”, “Artist, Band or Public Figure”, “Entertainment”, and “Cause or Community”. The closest to a means of controlling a personal pseudonymic identity is “Artist, Band or Public Figure”, which is limited alongside other Facebook pages in its interaction abilities.

By comparison/contrast, G+ only has “Storefront (Restaurant, Retail Store, hotel, etc.)”, “Service Area (Plumber, pizza delivery, taxi service, etc.)”, and “Brand (Product, sports team, music band, cause, etc.)”, which is even more confusing from the outset by the grouping of so many options into just three categories.

The ideal page

The ideal brand page system which would work perfectly for personal pseudonyms at the intimacy perhaps most desired by drag performers in an SNS, IMO, is a combination of Facebook’s presentation and G+’s functionality and interactivity:

Having at least 6 page-creation options including “Artist, Band or Public Figure”, or even a 7th “Character or Pseudonym” option.
Having the ability to follow/be followed by users and create/join groups “as” the brand page.
Have the option to switch to a preferred brand page identity upon login to one’s personal user identity.
Have the ability to restrict access to one’s personal profile while simultaneously operating a brand-page identity.

In such a system, performance artists such as drag performers would have the full ability to interact with their fans as their pseudonyms or public personas, to organize their fans into discussion groups (both public, private and secret) under their personas, and to easily invite fans to events (or even games and apps), all without revealing or exposing any of their personal profiles to the public.

When the brand pages are not fully baked, not fully conceptualized as alternative identities for both individuals and corporated groups, the ability to control your presence is hobbled. Performers like Sister Roma offer an opportunity for Facebook, G+ and the SNS sites of our era to not only listen more to their users, but to make their brand pages more useful for more people. The “Real Name” policy (as well as the restriction against multiple profiles on sites like LinkedIn) only hurts privacy, doesn’t help the quality of conversations on Facebook, and is not remedied by half-baked brand page tools.

On the #IndieWeb

July 5, 2014To Export 2, Uncategorizedfacebook, indieweb, indiewebcamp, social media, social networking, TwitterHarry Underwood

I have recently discovered the #IndieWeb.

The #IndieWeb is a decentralized means of bloggers replying to other bloggers without having to be logged into a corporately-owned, centralized social network (or “silo”, like Facebook or Twitter). It doesn’t make use of single log-ins, it doesn’t make use of having to put your “real name” on your profile.

It departs a bit from other existing initiatives of decentralized social networking services, such as Diaspora and Friendica, which try to retain a Facebook/Twitter-like user experience without the lock-in (by allowing you to install the software to host a social network site on your own server and allowing users to connect as friends and talking to each other across servers).

Instead, IndieWeb is even more decentralized than that. Technically, it relies even less on a common user interface, and it doesn’t necessarily provide for a means of “friending” or “following” another blogger on another server. Instead, the focus is on receiving notifications of replies or likes/faves from other blogs, especially those which are self-hosted.

The more that I read about it, the more I find the idea of the IndieWeb to be fascinating. It can keep much of the sort of connectivity that is sought by bloggers (say, on WordPress.com or on self-hosted WordPress sites) through social media site users without the sort of reliance upon logged-in comments or shares through first-parties such as Facebook or third parties such as Disqus and Livefyre.

But it’s pretty next level. I don’t think I can use it on WordPress.com, but if I ever move the posts from here onto a self-hosted WordPress site, I would install it just to see how many IndieWeb users would be interested.

I also wish I could import my public Facebook and Twitter posts over to a public personal blog, at least to have a backup of much of that data.

Questions from Inexperience

Can the emphasis of IndieWeb on “personal blogs” conflict with those blogs which expand into full-on “news sites” or “community blogs” (i.e., Huffington Post, TPM, Gawker, etc.)?

The latter type of blog often features the registration of users who submit post comments or lower-tier post content, while the bloggers remain separately credentialed in their ability to post first-tier content. Most news blogs may have a large community of users who are registered simply for the purpose of keeping their own comment histories lined up, or faving each others comments.

I wonder if the traffic and authorship growth of a blog from “personal” to “community” affect the functionality of an IndieWeb-capable blog.

The “dislike” button: further ruminations

April 25, 2011Tech, To Export 2, Uncategorizedfacebook, internet, like button, ranking, technologyHarry Underwood

ReadWriteWeb posted an editorial piece on why the “dislike” button is not coming to Facebook. I can see the author’s point about how the button could have adverse effects upon brands (I’m assuming the “Ripoff Report” sort of effect, in the worst case).

However, from my own perspective and outside of the business perspective, I haven’t exactly found any specific function for the “dislike” or “mod down” button idea, other than to visually show how many people didn’t like an item. Unlike the controversial function of the button on Digg and Reddit (in which a sufficient number of mods-down results in a demotion of the item from the all-important front page), the likes of Facebook and Twitter do not have such all-important front pages which would allow for the easy disappearance of a promoted item due to sufficient amounts of “dislikes” or “downtweets”.

At present, YouTube’s “dislike” button also lacks a specific function other than denoting the number of people who simply did not like a particular video. Instead, an alternate link for the “reporting” of the video to YouTube censors appears when one clicks the “dislike” button.

That’s it. No other function. No impact beyond an aesthetically-skin-deep perception of “democracy”.

Perhaps this neutered version of the “user moderation” feature is useful to those who simply wish to promote their brands or content (and not accept critique of the same), but it bodes ill for future experiments in online user engagement, especially those which may take a functional cue from the likes of Digg and Reddit.

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