(via)

Gary Stix:

These are “Facebook abstainers,” people who engage in a “performative mode of resistance, which must be understood within the context of a neoliberal consumer culture, in which subjects are empowered to act through consumption choices—or in this case non-consumption choices—and through the public display of those choices.” In other words, is dropping your Facebook account an act of political defiance?

According to Portwood-Stacer, those who commit “Facebook suicide” or frequent the @NotOnFacebook Twitter account, or post to the hashtag #facebooksucks (Facebook no, Twitter si?) or flee to the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine may be embracing a form of reverse snobbery: “taste and distinction are invoked by refusers through their conspicuous display of non-consumption.” Call it reverse Veblenism or maybe just imagine retro hipsters from Williamsburg casting off the psychological bondage of keeping up with social media commitments.

…One refuser named Bruce and his male family members “felt that masculine norms of rugged independence and seriousness—in contrast to the implicit femininity of playfulness and dependence—were bound up in the men’s vocal disidentification with social networking activities.”

I am easily amused.