Your live depends on facebook?

The life I've built depends on communication, and the people and groups I wish to communicate with mostly use FB.

The non-profit I volunteer with organizes everything over FB. The union I work under announces almost everything over FB. I literally never look at my FB "feed" but I've got 5 private groups that I check every day. If I stopped using FB, I'd be completely out of the loop with almost everything I do.

I suspect that's how a lot of the world operates. FB is free and easy and reliable and everybody already has an account. It lets people post text and photos and comments, and tag other people, and report when they've seen something. That's everything we used to use email for (and a bit more), but more convenient.

I got my first cell phone a couple months ago. It's a lot easier for me to live without a cell phone than to live without FB. No cell phone means I have to wait a couple hours to read my messages. No FB would mean I wouldn't get organization news at all.

Even for people who hate FB on principle, they've never suggested an alternative that meets our needs better today. Possibly Google's services could, but a significant number of people I know don't have Google accounts (or use Gmail), and the people who hate FB usually hate Google just as much. Possibly Yammer, but ditto everything (and Microsoft).

Decentralized social networks are a cool idea, but until FB starts breaking so bad that we're unable to communicate about our upcoming project, we have no reason to consider switching to anything else.

I love my relatives, and Facebook is how they communicate.

Don't they all have email addresses?

I'm not saying that you're entirely wrong, because I've used that rationalization for keeping Facebook in the past.

What I do instead is just maintain an address book of everyone I know and send them an update on my life every once in a great while. It's much more fulfilling.

How is that different from them asking me "don't you have a web browser?"

I'm already the black sheep of my family, I'm not going to make it worse because strangers on the internet told me to.

(I do take some precautions, like only using Facebook in a private window, and certainly never on my phone.)

If you want to live life by what your family thinks of you, by all means, do so. Respectfully, however, if you can't consider what strangers on the internet have to say, you're significantly limiting its usefulness to you.

I'll turn that hypothetical question you posed around and ask how saying that email isn't sufficient for keeping in touch is any different from saying "Who needs greeting cards? Just let Facebook tell you to post on someone's timeline when it's a birthday or holiday."

I'm not denying that Facebook has some utility, but it's changed our definition of keeping in touch to value mass quantity over quality. If one values quality communication, Facebook is completely unnecessary and can be replaced with email which is an existing, standardized, ubiquitous, and sufficient means of keeping in contact with people. Your family would be statistical outliers if almost all of them didn't have an email you could send to.

In conjunction with "your life depends on facebook?", I'm simply saying that while one can use Facebook, there is such a thing as a viable alternative with its own advantages. It's controversial, I know.