Today I deactivated my account on Facebook. I found it essentially useless except to keep up with my daughter at college, but truthfully I'd rather Skype her than browse her photos. I'm not social enough to care to see photos of everyone's vacation or most recent beer-fest. And honestly – $16b valuation? For a dating site? Really America?

I don't have a Twitter account and don't use Twitter. It's not important to me to know what Demi Moore or Ashton Kutcher had for lunch yesterday. I do have a LinkedIn account – that, at least, seems to have a purpose though its getting too social to remain useful for much longer. I get most of my news from The Daily Show. News is generally too awful not to laugh about it.

I'm on probably a dozen or more email lists. And that's good enough. How much interaction is really necesary anyway?

Update: 2012-05-17

I just read this story about Facebook holdouts and quiiters (like myself).  It made me realize one other thing about electronic communications like Facebook:  in 50 or 100 years, where will all that information be?  How will historians study it?  All those wonderful tales of communication between Einstein and Mileva and Elsa will be less interesting when the next Einstein's communications are written in Twitteresqe in 140 characters or less.  Today's youth do themselves (and their grandchildren) a great disservice, I think.