For some spontaneous reason, I deleted my Facebook on Tuesday. Instead of planning to do it and making excuses not to, I just did it. Since this summer, I’ve wanted to retest my ability to stay off the site but made excuses like, “I’m going to a new place” “I need it for college” “I’ll be meeting tons of new people,” when actually I’ve been trying to limit the ways that technology negatively affects my day to day.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that Facebook is a great tool. During my travels, I posted a lot about what I was up to and caught up with friends from home on how college was going. It was a great way to share photos and experiences with the people I love from far away and was almost the only way that I kept in touch with people from home. Still, now, Facebook can be an awesome tool to make connections and to plan get togethers or events. But I want to test the experience of not having Facebook in college. I have a phone now and everyone who would contact me through Facebook has my number, as I have theirs, and any event that I should attend at such a small school like Middlebury I will hear about from friends or from other news.

Others may think that deleting Facebook is pointless. You can definitely control your use of Facebook so that it doesn’t interfere with how you interact with people one on one, but it also encourages social competitiveness when you do get online. I found myself making sure I was tagged in certain photos a couple weeks ago and then asked myself, “Why am I doing this?” The answer, though many people may try to cover it up with excuses or alternate explanations, is that Facebook brings out the materialistic side of all of us. The reason we want to share photos and get tagged is because we want other people to see what we are doing. I’m not going to lie to myself anymore. I was being superficial, and I don’t want superficiality to be one of my values.

Facebook, I think, is a tricky thing. It’s great for many, many reasons. I will miss out on those random Facebook encounters where people seek me out or vice versa due to some random connection, and then we actually share information and thoughts on which we can expand. I will miss getting random messages from people at home, but that just means I can either call them, text them, or just have a great conversation in 2 weeks when I see them next. Facebook is great for many reasons, but it also affects how we think and the things we care about. In deleting my Facebook, I want to see whether the benefits outweigh the takeaways. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. I’ve promised myself to at least make it till after finals.