Before writing this post, my boyfriend warned me, “Careful, you might offend all of the facebook lovers out there.” It was a fair warning, but I am not here to bash facebook or its users. This is more of a reflection of what my use and preconceptions of facebook have become over the years.
I’ve had a facebook account for just about six years. I made it just after they stopped doing the college email address requirement (our parents don’t even know about those days). Throughout my senior year of high school, I didn’t have a facebook. My friends would talk about it, but just as I had never made a myspace, I was adamant about not making a facebook. I didn’t want to get ‘sucked in.’ After graduation, my friend asked if she could create my profile. Her unspoken argument: How could you go into the summer after our senior year without being tagged in all our pictures? How could you go into college without a facebook? Apathetically, I said, “Sure, whatever…” but in reality, it was the perfect excuse to have a facebook without the guilt of actually making one for myself. I didn’t technically get sucked in, but who was I kidding? I had caved, and there was no going back.
The Early Years of facebook meant:
Your profile picture. The perfect way to display yourself just as you want to come across to others.
Tagging. I thought this was God’s gift to man. Hovering over people’s faces to see who they were? Sure, maybe you knew most of the people in the pictures you were tagged in, but what about that person… what was their name again? We take this for granted now, but tagging was very innovative at the time. Also, little did I know how helpful it would be during college when we were all meeting more people than we could count, literally.
Your tagged pictures. God, I was so vain back then. I would click through the same pictures of myself multiple times in the day, wondering how other users saw me. Do I look pretty in this picture? Do I look like I’m living the life?
Notifications. I can’t even remember how notifications were indicated before they incorporated the red tally, but all I know is that whenever they would appear, it would be like discovering little candies in your Christmas stocking. Hell, they still are like that.
‘Keeping in touch’ was not the main use of facebook back then. Most of the friends I had were from my graduating class. Even after our graduation, we saw each other pretty frequently, so what need did we have for keeping in touch? Still, I can remember us writing inside jokes or posting humorous videos/pictures on each other’s walls. There were no meems back then, and there was no such thing as posting something to your own wall. You had a “status update” that had to begin with “I am” and could only be 100 characters. Remember those days? You also had to physically click ‘refresh’ in order to see if your friends updated their status; it did not auto-refresh. Also, if you reached the bottom of the feed, you had to click to see more. (God, we were like cavemen.)
I actually came to love facebook, especially for the photo sharing. Since I got my first camera in the 5th grade, I’ve always been the friend to take pictures during our hangouts or outings. I went through a picturetrail, photobucket, friendster, xanga… (Okay, xanga was not for photo sharing, but I just wanted to throw that little piece of nostalgia in there.) Facebook, however, succeeded in combining your friends’ profiles with photo sharing. No need to post your photos anywhere else! I felt obligated to post my pictures. My friends wanted to see pictures of themselves, and I was going to deliver. This is probably what brought me deeper and deeper into my facbeook usage. I think from July 2007 to December 2012, there was not one event that I took pictures at and didn’t post them. In retrospect, I’ve dedicated days and days of my life to arranging my photos, uploading them to facebook, arranging my albums, and keeping up with tags and comments — DAYS, MAYBE MONTHS of my life gone!
I’ve tried ‘quitting facebook’ cold turkey several times before. The first was during the second semester of my freshman year of college when I was A) probably upset over a boy and B) spending way too much time on it, when I should’ve been doing homework, or I don’t know, SOMETHING ELSE other than facebook. The second time was sometime later during my college years when I was definitely upset over a boy. Both times, my friends would tell me to come back to facebook, so that their picture count would go up again. And you know what facebook so cleverly implemented, so as not to lose its members permanently? You were always able to reactivate your profile after ‘deleting it,’ so you really had nothing to lose. Your profile and pictures would be there waiting for you, should you ever decide to come back. Bastards. The second time I deactivated my facebook, they even included a survey of why I was deactivating it with reasons, such as: being unproductive/spending too much time on it, being bothered by friend requests or current friends, applying for work but there is unprofessional content on my personal profile, etc. If I selected any of the reasons, a little popup would appear with ways to counteract my reasons, like “Did you know you can adjust the privacy settings of your profile, so that only the people you allow can see your content?” AND if that wasn’t enough, facebook would ask me one final time, “Are you sure you want to deactivate your profile?” and there would be pictures of my closest friends (how did they know?) at the bottom with the caption, “So and so is going to miss you!… And so and so too!” No matter how long I went with a deactivated profile, I always came back, almost as if there could be no other way.
Facebook has become so advanced in communicating with others internationally. I think it’s wonderful that I can keep in touch with my relatives in the Philippines, but at the same time, this ease of communication has almost made us primitive. With facebook, I can share things with them easily, knowing they will see it, but in the 90s and early 2000s when email was our only form of communication, other than a phone call, responses weren’t necessarily summed up in one word. If you were going to respond at all to an email, out of courtesy, you’d have to put some thought into it. Make it worth their while, or don’t respond at all. With facebook, commenting and liking is so simple. Even if you haven’t seen each other in years, it feels as if you have a consistent back and forth exchange. Even if the other party doesn’t respond with a comment or a like, at least you could see what they were up to by going through their profile pics or recent posts. This is all well and great and everything, but now, making that extra effort to call/text/write is almost unnecessary. No need to write an email to catch up because you can just look at the person’s profile. I understand that with the internet/technology boom, this is how our interactions are evolving, but to be honest, I’m not too keen on this. I don’t have the energy anymore to meticulously edit my profile, so that it exactly matches all of my current interests, ideals, revelations, plans, and so on. I still haven’t figured those all out; why would I want someone else to figure it out for me? My profile doesn’t define me, dammit. It just doesn’t. My profile has, in a way, grown up with me. You can see how I’ve physically grown from late adolescence to my early twenties. You can see my relationships, my party days, the extracurricular activities I was involved in, the people I used to (or still do) surround myself with. You can see it all there in front of you. Facebook even utilized that categorization of years, so you can skip all of the current stuff I’m into and ‘get to know’ how I was when I used to dance on tables and play beer pong every other night. I sure as hell don’t regret those years, but I have learned a great deal about myself and about life since those days. I can speak for myself, but can my pictures? No! We think we know what people are like or what their ideals are from looking at their profiles, but it only grazes the surface of who people really are (hopefully).
I knew I wanted an outlet to write and share my pictures in a creative way. I tried to convince myself that facebook would suffice, but it became my comfort zone. I have over a thousand “friends,” so getting likes on something I create or say is not difficult. I also thought I could keep up with current events through what people posted on their newsfeeds, but it just all seemed too superficial to be authentic. So why didn’t I just look to other social networks? I knew blogs, apps, and other online communities were out there, but I had invested so much time over the years making myself seem like a decent person on facebook that I just couldn’t do it all over again on a completely different website. I was old-fashioned; I knew how to work with facebook, so that’s what I wanted to stick with… until this past February.
Without making a big deal about it, I gave up facebook for lent. 40 days with absolutely no posting, no uploading, no sharing, and no clicking through feeds or pictures. This time I didn’t deactivate my profile; I just logged out and didn’t log back in until this past Monday. Not having to document my life for others allowed me to be more present to the moment and document my life mentally. It’s funny though because although I was not posting anything to my facebook, people I’d see in person would still ask me about things I was doing because of what my friends and loved ones were sharing on their facebooks. They’d say, “I saw you went to a concert last night. How was it?” Great, thanks for asking… How did you know that? I guess I can’t run away from facebook, but not going on it every hour allowed me to be open to other forms of social media. Now I blog; I read; I create. I know, I know… I’ve been under a rock this whole time.
I personally can’t JUST use facebook for what it’s good for, like staying connected with long lost relatives or friends, marketing yourself and/or your business, etc. If I add facebook to my bookmark bar again, I will click it every time I need to dull my thoughts. It’s like the tabloid that you pick up when you’re waiting in line at the grocery; you don’t need that information, but it’s still there for your mind to absorb. I realize it doesn’t have to be used for this reason, but because it started out as such a superficial outlet for me, that’s what it ends up being. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe I’m just stuck with that mentality because my social network was witness to my most vulnerable years, but it was the luck of the draw that my generation grew up with facebook, and this is how I’m learning from it.
Questions for fun:
– Do you have a facebook? How long ago did you create your profile? How did it impact your personality?
– What do you use facebook for nowadays?
Top picture taken from FlickCC.
The Sum of 20Something 