Snippet: Sarah Jeong Tried Leaving Facebook. She Couldn’t. ☇

The Verge’s Sarah Jeong shared more than a few experiences in her time of using Facebook in college through today and many of the thoughts echoed true for me:

In the early days, I loved Facebook. I loved being able to keep tabs on hundreds of college classmates all at once, of being able to tag all my dorm mates in the photos we took on our garbage 7 megapixel cameras, of creeping on crushes, of keeping up with every person I met at a party or in a classroom without doing very much work. I was terribly awkward and a little lazy and as a result, I never developed the skills that my parents’ generation cultivated in order to maintain their social networks.

Of the twelve years since I created a Facebook account, I only spent one year truly off the platform. And during that year, I think I glimpsed what Facebook is, and what hold it has on us. For years, deriding the fripperies of social media has practically become a national pastime, an easy piece of snobbery. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a frequently heard response would be, “Well, why not quit?” or “Don’t give your data to tech companies.”