She Fled From Facebook to – Marfa – to Write a Book – about Facebook

The Washington Post's magazine features Katherine Losse this week, “Refugee From Facebook.”  Her book, The Boy Kings, is her inside view of Facebook and explains why she divested herself of FB stock (and thus got a lot of money because she sold when the stock was still high) and deleted all her FB pages and info.
Then she moved to Marfa, Texas -- where we were supposed to be this month until the Las Vidas Perfectas video shoot got postponed. I might have met her.  Marfa's only got 2,000 residents.

Quote:

[ " Another time, Losse cringed when she learned that a team of Facebook engineers was developing what they called “dark profiles” — pages for people who had not signed up for the service but who had been identified in posts by Facebook users. The dark profiles were not to be visible to ordinary users, Losse said, but if the person eventually signed up, Facebook would activate those latent links to other users. " ]

Quote:

[ " But Losse’s concerns about online socializing tracks with the findings of Sherry Turkle, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology psychologist who says users of social media have little understanding of the personal information they are giving away. Nor, she said, do many understand the potentially distorting consequences when they put their lives on public display, as what amounts to an ongoing performance on social media. " ]

Quote:

[ " Losse eventually reactivated her Facebook account. Rejecting it altogether felt, to her, extreme. But she approached it this time with a new wariness, not as a place to make and maintain friendships but one where a new author could cultivate a public image. " ]

She felt Facebook was eating her life and providing an inauthentic social life, so she ran away to a more authentic place (an artists' colony!) to write a book about social media while using her wireless capacity and digital skills to interact with the rest of the world, including her editors for the endless drafts of the book she was writing.

I find this enormously amusing. Is it because as of this writing, neither el V nor I have fb accounts nor have we ever.