Yesterday I cleared another not-insignficant amount of detritus from my life. I've been a bit over Face-ache for quite a while - I didn't have an account for years and have remained an ambivalent user. Recent events only confirmed what I suspected - that the platform's ethics were very questionable. I use FB mainly for 'business' - I have 122 followers - the benefits of which are also questionable. It's just 'what you do' when you are trying to promote yourself online.
Facebook,
Instagram and a
website are mandatory. And then there's LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter,
Redbubble, links to
professional organisations you belong to....and probably a lot more I don't know about.
When the Zuckerburg scandal hit the news I wasn't surprised but it was the prompt I needed to do something about it. So I went looking to see what information FB had on me. It wasn't too difficult to find and download the data and I now have it on file. However Facebook don't make it easy to end the romance - the only way to get this info out of FB's archives altogether is to delete the account. They are sneaky because deactivating an account won't get rid of the data - you have to DELETE THE ACCOUNT and they give you a 14 day 'cooling off' period before they will do that. How considerate of them. But it's even more complicated than that.
I've been managing both a 'personal account' under my own name and a 'business page' for Dr Grafix. I didn't want to lose the followers on my page so closing my personal account wasn't simply a matter of one 'click' under Settings because it would have made the Dr Grafix page defunct also. I had to open a new Facebook account under a different identity and appoint that person as administrator for the page before I could disappear. Then there was the problem of the 104 'friends' I had acquired - most of whom I could happily lose, but a few I wanted to stay in touch with.
The product arm of what I laughingly call my 'business' is called Munted Doll (if you want to know how I arrived at that name - click
here for the blog post) so I took on that identity to open a new account with a false birthdate and very few personal details. I posted on my Timeline that I would be deleting my personal account and opening a new one for close friends and family only. I suggested that if people wanted to stay in touch they should like my Dr Grafix page. I picked up 5 more followers there so someone was actually watching. Then I went through my friends list, cut it down from 104 to 19 and sent them friend requests from my new
Munted Doll account. Phew! All good.
I hadn't thought much about how my new identity presented on Facebook until I saw this:
Brilliant - there's something perverse and delightfully subversive about having 'Munted' as a 'Christian' name.
