In late February stories about Christians giving up Facebook for Lent were all over the Web. There was so much hype about it one might have wondered if Facebook traffic would suddenly fall off in the month before Easter, which is Sunday. According to Hitwise, not so much.
It’s hard to gauge how many practicing Catholics and Lenten-observant Protestants comprise the now 200 million Facebook population, but it may be safe to say there’s a fair amount. Just this one Christian group boasts 840,000 members. Many of those who gave up Facebook posted an image saying so to their profiles.
It’s even harder to gauge just how many decided to make the sacrifice at all, but the official Giving Up Facebook for Lent group has about 240 members, interestingly enough with its most recent post on March 15, about three weeks into Lent.
No finger-pointing or stone-throwing here, though. Lots of people don’t make it to the end, which is no cardinal sin, so to speak, and those who don’t make it tend to add that fact to their appreciation of the difficulty of the sacrifice inspiring the tradition in the first place—giving up things you love is really, really hard.
But it’s likely not lack of endurance, but the sheer number of people who made no such commitment dwarfing out the few, the proud, the faithful. Since the end of January, Facebook’s market share of US visits has skyrocketed.
So we’ll just assume most of them made it, and on Sunday we’ll see them back again, frantically responding to all the requests and photos they missed while they were out. The skeptic in me wonders if they still got updates in email and if that counts.
