It was the start of 2007 and I had just moved to London to start my Masters in Interactive Media when I signed up to MySpace. I was a fairly late adopter of social media since I favoured (and still do) using the mobile phone when I want to speak to my friends. It immediately annoyed me that people stopped using their mobiles when they realised that they could message each other through MySpace for free. It got to a point where some friends would only contact me on MySpace and if I didn’t check it, I would miss things. For about five months, I enjoyed using MySpace and spent time crafting my page using html to make sure that I was completely happy with it. I quickly became aware of how important it is to edit your ‘details’ to ensure that you present yourself properly to your friends online. The popular thing to do was to fill in all sorts of ridiculous information about yourself such as your favourite bands and who were your ‘top friends’. This was awkward and put quite a lot of pressure on me and my friends to appear to be cool. A little too much concern was given to editing and re-editing this information, and it was great fun to edit someone else’s entire page when you discovered that they’d forgotten to sign themselves out.
Then, one day I saw a friend logging out of his MySpace and then logging in to his Facebook account. I asked what it was all about and he said, “it’s like MySpace but better. Things don’t look as good, but it’s easier to use’. I doubted this, and was immediately against the idea of having to re-enter all of my carefully selected information about myself. My friend told me, “trust me, once you’re on Facebook, you’ll forget all about MySpace”. For another two months I resisted as more and more of my friends started signing up to Facebook. I even deleted my MySpace account as I was fed up with people relying on it to get in contact with me. Then, one Monday in July 2007 I crumbled and signed up to Facebook. Immediately, I wasn’t impressed. It was confusing and felt incredibly sterile; there were no custom pages, or music playing on people’s ‘walls’. However, after a month of using it, I had made ‘friends’ with almost everyone I have said more than five words to in the last twenty years. I then was shocked to discover that photos of me were popping up and that everyone could see them. Censoring myself became a daily chore as I untagged myself from entire albums of nights out that my friends were enthusiastically uploading.
This is when I began to understand the allure of the site; it’s all about you, the user. You are encouraged to interact under the premise that the more you put in, the more you get out of it. Logging in becomes an exciting activity as you eagerly anticipate seeing just how many people have interacted with you in some way (tagging, poking, sharing a link, sending you a message). Herein lies the problem – Facebook’s users become hooked on all the little features available to them and it soon becomes part of the routine’ to check in on your account and see what’s new. This sucks as it is siphoning off the time that should be spent catching up with someone in real life. I would rather spend one evening a week catching up with an old friend than spending that time flipping through Facebook to see how many people have ‘liked’ my link of a dog running into a wall. Facebook has become a serious problem because too many people take it too seriously; for example, a friend of mine became incredibly agitated recently when I didn’t bother responding to their invitation to birthday drinks, I figured I would just turn up to it, and when I did, I was confronted with “I didn’t expect to see you here because you didn’t reply to my event invitation on old FaceyB”. Ridiculous.
Recently I went on a Facebook friend ‘cull’ and decided that I’d had enough of people that I spoke to one afternoon when I was sixteen being able to track my every movement through my wall. I now only have ‘friends’ on Facebook that I speak to regularly in the real world, and am very careful to not add anyone I work with. I’ve worked it out: keep your friends on Facebook, and your colleagues on Linked In and everyone else (including family) can email me.
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