I had been feeling more ambivalent than usual about Facebook. Last month, when I logged on, my News Feed informed me, "Lizzy Branson commented on her status." It did not tell me what the original "status" on which she commented was, and when I realized I wanted to know, I realized more than ever that I really didn't want to know. I then stumbled upon William Deresiewicz's excellent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled "Faux Friendship," which I recommend to anyone whether or not they have lingering doubts about Facebooking. In it, Deresiewicz raises persuasive points about how Facebook has accelerated the perversion of the idea of friendship. His article explains the history of friendship better than I can, but it got me thinking. I found his points troubling and it led me to re-examine my relationship with Facebook. Later that week I deactivated my account, and this week I deleted it permanently.

I'm still confused by the way Facebook perverts the definitions of, and relations between, public and private such as how people post intimate and embarrassing pictures of themselves and become appalled when people look at them. But this has been a social phenomenon whose full implications remain to be seen. The more pressing question to me was what keeps people using a thing most people complain about using. We've all heard people complain-indeed, have ourselves complained-about the massive time suck that is Facebook and about its too-obvious tendency toward what can only be described as creepiness. Yet very few are willing to just abandon it.

Facebook is useful for some things, such as event scheduling and photo sharing. Simply, it is the most popular medium, the lingua franca of the Internet. This does not, of course, explain why someone made an account in the first place-bad ideas have the most profound inertia-which is my concern.

The photo-sharing aspect is, for many, a disgusting feedback loop in which the obsessive documentation of an event exceeds the importance of the event in itself. Cultural commentators have been noticing this phenomenon since at least as recently as Don DeLillo's "Most Photographed Barn in America" in his 1986 novel White Noise-a memorable scene in which people take pictures of a barn because that's what you're supposed to do, but no one really knows why; indeed, no one even really actually looks at the barn. Facebook has simply accelerated and democratized this process. Few parties are complete without someone trying to document the too-typical wild and crazy things that happen. Just like the discovery of halitosis created new needs, Facebook has helped create a new need: It has helped make people realize how desperate they are to prove to people that they do, indeed, do things.

People tout the idea that Facebook gives them an opportunity to "keep in touch" with long-lost friends. Deresiwicz argues that it doesn't: It gives you the impression that you are keeping in touch with them. By all means, have meaningful connections with people you vaguely remember from middle school. I'll allow that this is a possibility greatly facilitated by Facebook, but there's often a good reason people fall out of contact, and when there isn't, or coincidental happenstance intervenes, there's no reason why Facebook's cumbersome messaging interface or totally public Wall are superior to e-mail or telephone.

True, Facebook can help facilitate reconnecting with someone, but the Internet-combined with the power of mutual friends-provides other means of doing the same thing. The difference is, again, laziness: We all want to believe we live in a world where we can stumble across long-lost friends when in fact it's never been easier to reconnect with them-all one needs is an actual desire and moderate effort. Facebook gives us the illusion of reconnecting easily. Our generation is so terrified of a gnawing sense of a lack of identity that we must list the cultural products (books, movies, TV shows, etc.) we enjoy and hope this speaks enough of our personality. I think of this as a Chinese restaurant menu, in which there are certain obvious combinations of acceptable responses. For example, the very popular "I really like almost anything except country and rap," at the end of lists that don't usually include Tuvan throat singing, big band swing, and Gregorian chants. If a list did include Tuvan throat singing, big band swing and Gregorian chants, one would have to sift through other clues to find out if that person is actually interesting. The irony dodge is, of course, the other obvious way out (are her favorite books really Dennis LaHaye's "Left Behind" series?).

We've grown so used to this, or set up our Facebook accounts so long ago, that we may have lost sight of how this is as fundamentally narcissistic as it is pointless. For whom do we make these attempts at self-definition, in terms almost exclusively of likes and dislikes? No one really believes that Facebook is a great way of meeting people. What it really has become is a way of evaluating people. It should strike more people as profoundly unsettling how people feel compelled to go from meeting a real-live person to evaluating his online representation of himself. With Facebook, you can keep in touch without keeping in touch, broadcasting whichever aspects of your life seem the most salient, and congratulate each other on your birthdays. Your college friends can see pictures of each other at the same party they went to, and your hometown or high school friends can look on from time to time. All that results is a combination of narcissism, in-group exclusion, and laziness-laziness as updating instead of communication, as reading passively instead of listening actively-most of us hope to move beyond by, at the very latest, high school graduation.

Indeed, along with the Chronicle article, it may be my impending graduation that has made me conscious of the perplexing immaturities inherent in the Facebooking experience. I have decided that Facebook is something better left behind to the proverbial dorm room of history.