My Summer Without Facebook

 
As a social media intern, I thought I would reflect on my summer without Facebook. The reason for my Facebook deactivation was for sorority recruitment. This summer I served as a Gamma Chi, otherwise known as a recruitment counselor, for sorority recruitment at the University of Louisville. As Gamma Chi’s, we are to provide an unbiased opinion and be able to help girls through the recruitment process without persuading them towards a certain sorority. Girls can very easily find out what you’re in through your social media profiles. The best way to assure no one found out what sorority I’m in was to privatize Twitter and Instagram, delete any pins associated with my sorority and to deactivate Facebook.
We deactivated back in April and let me tell you, it was not easy! One concern I had was my Klout score…but that quickly dissipated. Another tough realization was that I could no longer be retweeted. There’s nothing more exciting than a perfect tweet that gets multiple retweets by friends.
A problem the Gamma Chi’s ran into was that when we made our Gamma Chi pages on Facebook, we were accused of being spam and Facebook put us on a 30 day probation. What happened was we could log in and see everything, but we weren’t able to friend request, comment, like, or share! Due to our lack of friends, other than each other, we banned from any interaction because we were apparently not real people.
The glorious return to Facebook has been quite enjoyable. I have over 50 friends on my newsfeed, I have notifications daily and I’m allowed to interact. Something that I realized this summer was how much Facebook keeps me in the loop. I hate to say it, but birthdays were forgotten without Facebook’s reminder. I felt pretty left out all summer without being updated on my friends lives!
I had a pretty adventurous summer – I turned 21, went to Vegas and went to Disney – but I couldn’t share the awesome pictures or tell the funny stories. Needless to say, I’m happy to be reactivated. I am pretty ashamed to say that Facebook plays that big of a part in my life-keeping me informed of my friends birthdays, social events, etc. It was a big change this summer but I definitely saw how much of my life depends on that one website!