I have a Facebook account. I don’t use it, and indeed, it was created in a moment of semi-drunken weakness, years after L. told me I should have a Facebook. I’d known about Facebook since it was available only to students, but never saw the need to create an account. One night when I was half-drunk and couldn’t sleep, I got curious, and created one. I used my real name and a valid email, and the correct country of residence but no photos, and the rest of the information was either left blank or deliberately incorrect. In the light of morning, I remembered creating it, knew I didn’t really want it and would never use it, so I deactivated it. That’s one reason I’d never created an account in the first place; there’s no option to delete, only to deactivate…or so I’d thought until this morning. I don’t know whether it’s a result of their having come under fire over privacy concerns and making user information available to advertisers, or whether the option has always existed but was “hidden” enough that users would have difficulty finding it, but there is a way to permanently delete a Facebook account. Yay! There was nothing in mine that really mattered, and I never logged in after creating it (until I logged in a few minutes ago to delete it), but it kind of bothered me that it existed. In the event that I ever again become intoxicated enough to think I need a Facebook account and think better of it in the morning:

http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

It takes up to two weeks, but everything is deleted and the account is gone. I don’t have Twitter, either. I don’t think I’ve ever been that drunk. I can sort of understand Facebook, and even (shudder) MySpace for people who need more tasteless glitter graphics than Facebook provides, but Twitter is entirely beyond my comprehension. I suppose my mother would care what I had for breakfast, and maybe someone cares that I forgot to reset the password on that laptop yesterday, but most stuff…nobody cares, and that’s true of everyone, not just because I’m particularly boring. I guess, though, that we’ve evolved into such a “me me me” society that people really do want their own personal “internet channel” because they think other people actually give a rat’s arse.