I Am Still Gone

"Now I'm left like a flag atop a moon.
Precious one, you have abandoned me."
-VAST, "Thrown Away"

I've hesitated to admit how much the Facebook saga has bothered me. For those of you who skipped my last post, I'll offer a quick recap: after getting lured in by the charms of the popular social networking website, I was shut out. I had tried reporting a fake profile and found my own profile disabled, while the fake one persists.

I was leaning on Facebook more than I wanted to admit. I didn't need to remember my friend's birthdays because the website was doing it for me. I didn't need to copy email addresses into my email contact list because they were, in theory, always available just a few clicks away on Facebook, and the same is true, to a lesser degree, of phone numbers. More importantly, I felt like I was tied in to something. In theory, I spend all day at home alone while I'm looking for work, except when I go out to a coffee shop where I do the same things I can do at home, but in public, while still mostly alone. It's lonely. Facebook allowed me to share the minute details of my life with a wide group of people, some actual friends, some acquaintances, some who I've had no interaction with outside the website, and it allowed those same people to share the details of their lives with me. Through the comments people would make and the pictures they would post, I was beginning to develop a sense of the web of interconnections between the people in my periphery, and was starting to feel knotted into that web. I was making new friends. I was reconnecting with friends or classmates that I'd lost over the years. I even made a contact for a possible job.

I suppose I knew that I was spending too much time there, investing too much energy, but I justified it by listing all the above reasons, and justified it by telling myself it was at worst harmless and at best actually useful as a networking tool, and all right as long as I still got my work done and still got myself out of the house every day. Yes, I wasted time on there, but I didn't see what the damage could be. Not, that is, until two weeks ago, when my profile became disabled.

On the first day, I thought, well, it's just a mistake and they'll correct it quickly.

On the second day, I emailed them again, maybe a bit impatient, maybe already revealing myself to be addict needing his fix but not quite willing to admit it to myself.

On the third day, I thought, hopefully today.

On the fourth day, a Saturday, I knew nothing was going to move in my favor and I tried to keep calm about it. That same day I missed a major social event in town because I'd already started relying on Facebook as a way to make those sort of plans. It was the sort of thing I would have attended with acquaintances if I'd known of any who were going, but without Facebook status updates to verify this, I ended up staying home.

On the sixth day, Monday, I thought, well, it took them a few days to process my initial request to delete someone so they must be overworked. Maybe today.

Over the course of the next few days, I started to lose hope. I started to feel like the "overworked" excuse wasn't cutting it any more and the only possibility is that they were blatantly ignoring my requests. I felt powerless and if I can say this without sounding absurd, a bit violated.
Friends suggested ways I could possibly bring some attention to my situation, but nothing worked, nothing has worked and I'm not going to pretend I don't want to get back on. I want to get back on. I miss it terribly and I don't even care what their excuse will be for this mistreatment of me, I know I will forgive them for it. It's my nature to forgive, always. But I can't forgive them until I know what happened and I can't forgive them until it's made right.

On the eleventh day, I accidentally discovered something unusual. I have a Facebook application for my phone, and I clicked it, expecting to get rejected as my web browser had been doing so consistently, but no, it let me in. At first I got excited and thought my account had been reinstated as quietly as it had been shut down, but no, the browser still denied me. The good news was that my account remains intact, and once I am back on I will not need to rebuild my network or re-upload my photos. The less good news was how this limited access makes me feel. I thought it would be nice to be able to get back on, even in such a limited fashion, but it isn't. I can see what my friends are doing, can see the fun they're having without me, but I can't participate and can't use the site to contact any of them. I'm a ghost; I can look but can't interact. One of my greatest fears is to be made invisible, to be marginalized into the insignificant, and Facebook has inadvertently accomplished bringing this dread into reality.

It's the thirteenth day today. I have emailed every address I could find for them, and used their web form as well, for a total of five attempts at contact, and to date, I have not received even a whispered form letter of a response, not a word.

So why have I revisited this topic which I covered relatively successfully just a few days ago in a previous post? I was speaking with my friend Kevin tonight, and Kevin is responsible for getting me on to Facebook in the first place, and Kevin is angry that this is happening and doing everything he can to help me back on, but more importantly, Kevin got me thinking about this in a way that I hadn't before. The issue here is not with my dependence on "this year's model" of a social networking website. The issue is how this mishap has made me feel, and Facebook's utter lack of a response, and how this is a tiny, shadowboxed version of a much larger problem.

As a society we rely increasingly on technology to serve basic functions for us. There was a time when the phrase "social networking" could only possibly mean getting out of one's house and meeting other people in the flesh. There was a time when all telephones were bound by wires and a time before that with no telephones at all. The companies that provide us these technologies do so increasingly without faces, and sometimes even without voice, like Facebook, which lists no phone number, and for a person like me, only one email address as a point of contact. I have no way of knowing if my emails are even being received by a human being, if my pleas are being heard at all, or if there is any incentive at all for the Facebook employee who sees my messages to bother to help me out. A company that pushes out a paradigm shifting technology needs to also take the responsibility to support the users of that technology responsibly, and it shouldn't matter whether the service is free or the company is turning a profit. If they want to sell me on their website and how fun it is, and let it change the way I conduct my life, they had better be prepared to deal with me when they accidentally yank the rug out from under me, and apparently, they are not. It is increasingly common with web 2.0 companies to fail to provide an appropriate mechanism for their customers to interact with them, human being to human being, and this is a disturbing trend. How many science fiction stories have been written about future worlds where all people are networked into a grid of some sort, and the terrifying consequences when one person is, through whatever means, dropped from the grid? That is what is happening now, and in a smaller way, that is what is happening to me.

It makes me sad and it makes me angry. Who do they think they are, to ignore me like this? I want to scream out that I am still here, but they will not listen, and they hold all the power in the world they've created, and i can scream all I want, but now I am just a ghost, just a shadow.