Classic Rant #131 (November 12, 2009): Facebook Smackdown

Well, it has finally come to this.

I have taken my son off of Facebook. I think it is a bit too much for him to handle right now, so, to his chagrin, I removed his account.

Of course, you can't fully remove an account from Facebook. I discovered that after I removed his account, I could still access his information. In fact, I could start him up 1-2-3 again if I wanted to.

But I don't.

The problem is, as I have said before, that Facebook is being used incorrectly by the 14-year-olds of the world. They use it as an instant messaging service, and when they post something, they demand a reply quickly. If anybody interrupts this flow, they attack that person unmercifully, which is what happened to my son time and time again.

My son is a good kid, but I think he was in way over his head with Facebook. He got attacked left and right, even though his messages were not nasty in any way.

The major drawback with posting messages on Facebook and even through email is that you don't get the nuances you get when speaking to someone face to face or even on the phone. Some people took my son's messages to be something that they were not intended to be, and this led to numerous problems.

So last night was the last straw, and my wife and I pulled the plug on Facebook for him.

Look, we are not stupid. He can get on it again. We explained to him why Facebook was not a place for him to visit, and warned him that if he did, and we found out about it, he would face some type of punishment from us--probably taking his computer away for good.

My son is a good kid as I said before, but he is not a kid that is going to benefit from being on Facebook. So we took him off, and hopefully, he won't exhibit the anxiety that he has since he first got on and during the past few weeks.