I don't think not having Facebook is antisocial in that it hinders others, but I think not having one hinders yourself socially (at least at my age - 21).
If people are having a non-formal invite (i.e. not a wedding or a 21st which will usually get a paper invite), the event invites are all done through Facebook. If its a close friend of yours, you'll get a text message anyway, but if it's an acquaintance, you might find yourself without an invite, whereas all your mates do. If you want to go, you have to get them to ask if you can come, sometimes an uncomfortable conversation.
I also find (though I only have a few examples), that those without Facebook like to complain that they're never invited to events yet like to maintain moral superiority over those who do.
The world got along fine until facebook came out all of less than 10 years ago.
Since then lots of people have joined it and lots of people have left again, but arguably lots more have joined than have left.
Just like there is no obligation to join there is no obligation to leave and those that leave should not be made to feel guilty because "literally everyone else in your social circle is on Facebook, you're actually forcing them to go out of their way to interact with you, something that fits the definition to a T. Facebook is the preferred method of communication for most people, and if you're ignoring this and forcing people to conform, they'll resent it. "
If your social circle is defined by facebook then pity to you, there are many more established means of communicating with other people including but not limited to:
- personal contact in real life (visiting)
- the telephone
- letter writing
- email
- sign language
- the telegraph system
- telex
- flickr
- youtube
- fax
- smoke signals
- carrier pigeons
- various instant messaging systems
- sms
- twitter
And on and on, and quite a few of those didn't exist 30 years ago either.
Not using facebook does not force anybody 'out of their way' in order to communicate with you, the volume will drop a bit but those that want to communicate with you will always find a way at no great inconvenience to them, after all if the 'price' of facebook is low enough for you it is too high for me because I'm not an avid user of facebook.
That cuts both ways and the onus is not on the non-users to provide ease of access to the users of a certain medium.
Typically protocol negotiations will settle when a common medium has been found, and facebook is only one of many possibles.
Fortunately there is some freedom of choice left in this life and whether or not you choose to use a certain communications medium is one of the things we're still free to choose.
Just because something is a hype does not make it mandatory.
Let's not get caught in a false dichotomy. Not having a Facebook does not necessarily make you anti-social. But if we take "anti-social" to be a measure of one's social availability, not having Facebook decreases that measure. Communicating only by smoke signal or carrier pigeon would make you extremely unavailable whereas communicating by email and telephone would make you very available. In some demographics, users check their Facebook 3+ times per day, so depending on your social circle, being on Facebook makes you highly available.
For the record, I do not use Facebook, but I accept that it makes me less available. Friends who make Facebook events to organize events can invite nearly everyone they want to invite to their event on Facebook, but have to go out of their way to invite me via different means. This makes me anti-social to some (pretty small) degree.
The same admonishion should apply to sudont's assertions upthread. We shouldn't take it as a given that friends will resent you for having to compose an email or use IM.
