Recently, a girl I knew from school – not a friend, you
understand, just a Facebook friend – literally
live-blogged her birth via an onslaught of Facebook statuses.
Seriously.
My friends and I watched, fascinated, as she shared gory details about centimetres dilated and cramps and pessaries from her hospital bed, each status more stomach-clenching than the last. The day after the baby was born she added 238 photographs to an album in its name. One of them was a close up of the baby’s testicles.
Seriously.
This appeared to aggravate one of her other Facebook-oversharing-friends into attacking her via Facebook, sparking a good old Facebook row (‘Ignore her hun, block and delete she’s just jealous’ – although why you would be jealous, unless you had a baby boy with no testicles, remains unexplained).
Seriously.
My friends and I watched, fascinated, as she shared gory details about centimetres dilated and cramps and pessaries from her hospital bed, each status more stomach-clenching than the last. The day after the baby was born she added 238 photographs to an album in its name. One of them was a close up of the baby’s testicles.
Seriously.
This appeared to aggravate one of her other Facebook-oversharing-friends into attacking her via Facebook, sparking a good old Facebook row (‘Ignore her hun, block and delete she’s just jealous’ – although why you would be jealous, unless you had a baby boy with no testicles, remains unexplained).
I learnt two things from this debacle; firstly that if I
ever have a baby boy, I will try and look at him occasionally without the aid of
a camera lens, and secondly, that Facebook is just awful these days. I have
loved it and tried to keep that love alive for a very long time, but it is
dying, and it’s death tolls just make me sad.
My cousin was the first person who told me about Facebook.
It was 2008, and I was in my first year at university; those heady, endless
days of summer, Archers and Lemonade and battered poetry books and boys with
long hair and nights out in denim skirts with leggings and ballet shoes. I
signed up on my Dad’s old desktop and made my profile photo one of me and some
friends in my union. I was making the oral sex sign (classy) and had blonde
highlights that I thought made me look like Rachel Green, which maybe they did if
you were squinting at me from really far away in the dark. By the next morning
I had gained eight friends and a new addiction.
I stayed addicted for years. Myspace was too jazzy for me,
too much noise and colour and the constant fear of accidentally blaring out Cute Is What We Aim For at full blast
across a deadly silent library. Twitter was too verbose, too cool, too much
pressure to be funny more than once a day. Instagram, when it came along, was
vain and try hard. Snapchat made absolutely no sense at all. Facebook was, and
until fairly recently remained, my happy place.
Like MSN when I was sixteen, my relationships from 2008 and
onwards played out across my Facebook page. The first boy I liked at university
wrote jokey messages on my wall. I had a laptop with one of those separate Wifi
sticks that you plugged into the USB port and I would move it round our dingy
student house trying to find enough signal to reply. It was better than MSN
because you could take a bit longer and so be a bit funnier. We didn’t work
out. I remember rolling my eyes when I saw that he was ‘In A Relationship’ with somebody else.
I took photographs just so that I could upload them. There
was a 60-photograph-limit then so those early albums are carefully curated
edits, pieces of my life; summer balls, nights out, weekends away – our teenage
faces pressed close together, people I still love and people I don’t know at
all, all carefully tagged together and preserved in this blurry digital eternity. When Facebook introduced statuses, they
were prefixed with an ‘is’ and for a little while I thought of everything in terms of statuses –
‘Catherine is walking into town to get ice cream.’ ‘Catherine is hungover and
tired.’ ‘Catherine is finding it a bit weird how she now thinks in the third
person.’ I tried harder to be funny, witty, inventive. I created statuses about
my life – or did I create my life to make statuses? The lines blurred. Did I go
on nights out just to take photographs? Did I go and see that band just so I
could get Likes on a status? If I had a good time anyway, did it matter?
I met my husband in the third year of university. It took me
three meetings before I was brave enough to add him on Facebook. He had another
girlfriend then. We graduated. Facebook was the only string that held us
together, the only reason we remembered each other. I noticed we liked the same
music. He sent me a drunk text message – you
know, your Facebook statuses are really funny. We messaged occasionally. I
noticed his relationship status change. There was a gig, a band we both liked.
Did I want to go? I did. Would it have happened without Facebook? It would not.
I don’t know why it changed, but slowly, without me
noticing, Facebook started dying, and now here is all you can see if you log on:
1.
People asking stupid questions that they could
just Google (‘Will bleach get wine out of the carpet?’ Jesus Christ - can’t you just ask your
mum?)
2.
Adverts that creep you out because how do they know you’re going to a wedding next
week?
3.
People sharing videos of clips from football
games
4.
Photographs of other people’s babies/cats
5.
A comment saying ‘Jack Roberts liked a photo
from T!TS DAILY’ and a picture of a girl doing the washing up in a G string, as
if the Internet isn’t full enough of places for you to appreciate porn without
your Aunt Carol and everyone you used to go to school with knowing you’re doing
it
6.
Inspirational quotes that Marylin Monroe
might’ve once said.
Can’t we bring the good Facebook back? If I started making funny statuses again and sharing photos of my friends drunkenly eating burgers or doing shots of sambuca and saying ‘Maybe Attending’ to house parties I will definitely not be going to and setting my status as ‘Married’ to my best friend, who has been fraped and has her name set as ‘Julia Loves BarryManilow’ – if I did that, would we all did that, would Facebook be good again? Would I be 21 and carefree again?
Cat Cruse is hoping so.
Love this post! It's so true, Facebook has completely shifted over the years (and how, oh HOW, do they know what I'm thinking? Sometimes it's just damn creepy!) and now most of my feed is just so... blah. I pretty much just use group pages and messenger as a way to keep in touch with people, much like Whatsapp xxx
ReplyDeleteLucy @ La Lingua | Travel, Food, Italy
I had to laugh out loud with the baby-story. 238 pictures including testicles?! Mind blown. Such a great post!
ReplyDeletexx B