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Whisking up our social lives, why do we do this to ourselves?
A couple of days ago I ignored a Facebook friend request. I had not seen, spoken to or heard of the ‘friend’ in question since the year 2000. I only vaguely remembered him as an acquaintance of an acquaintance and because of his unusual name. The one conversation I can recall was stilted and awkward: polite but devoid of any common ground whatsoever. We were never friends in the slightest, but somehow, a decade later, he wants to “catch up” and know all about me. What I had for breakfast (cheese or cornflakes... the suspense!) and the severity of my hangover. He has a sudden desire to be puzzled at the inside jokes people he’s never heard off are posting on my wall. He can’t wait to study all my holiday snaps and count the lines I didn’t have back in 2000. Of course, he doesn’t really, he just wants to boost his numbers.
The more Facebook friends you have the more popular you appear, a bit like when we were kids in the playground. The cool guy would be swarmed by classmates basking in his glory, the nerds would sit, lost and forlorn through their taunts. Nobody wants to have an empty Facebook wall because none of their five friends ever bother posting anything on it. It’s so much cooler to display buzzing activity, like John giving you a lonely sheep for your non-existent farm and Aoife answering an application that asked her if she would snog you – even if she is your cousin. Alas, it’s not real. Acquiring fifteen new wall posts a day probably means that you’re spending so much time behind your laptop whisking up your ‘social life’ that you don’t have enough time to actually meet the people you’re interacting with for coffee or a dirty pint.
Same story with most photo albums – and I readily admit to being guilty of it myself. The pictures from last year’s trip to Morocco that made the cut show me standing at the foot of Africa’s second highest mountain, an impressive sight that shows what an adventurous globetrotter I am and secretly designed to make you all jealous. Look where I’ve been, you with your album of your weekend in Carrick-on-Shannon! But I refrained from uploading any snaps of me lying in the back of the rental car two days later, looking fairly dead in all shades of scarlet after sunstroke. Then there are the billions of pictures of “EPIC nights out!!!” in which life is summed up as a never-ending booze fest. Even if you see the same group of people nearly every day, everyone will still squeeze into a tight embrace when someone shouts “These go up on Facebook!” in the middle of the pub, so they can all gawk at each other online the next day and remember the craic. And the bigger the number of people in the photo, the more fun you must be having in the eyes of the whole wide world. You’re not going to be as happy if someone posts a picture of you sitting in a corner bawling your eyes out at 4 am and you’ll untag yourself as soon as it goes up, but then chances are that that person secretly doesn’t like you and is only on your Facebook so he or she can spy on you, gather information and then hold it against you or laugh at you behind your back.
Oh, and then there are the friends requests that just make me laugh out loud. From the people you really never got on with, people you passionately hoped would fall off a cliff or get hit by a bus when you were in class with them, people you hated so much that you couldn’t wait until the Leaving Cert so you could forget about them for the rest of your life. Wrong, because now they are all trying to add you on Facebook, like the guy who used to call me a “faggot” in secondary school. He has since come out, married his boyfriend in Europe and opened a café with him – how gay is that – so now we must, somehow, have an unbreakable bond. I didn’t think so. I’m going to laugh at your tacky wedding pictures and then ignore you all the same. He complained about it to a mutual friend, who truthfully replied: “D’uh, had you not called him a faggot every day for two years he might have added you.”
So I also ignored this week’s friend request. Not without a little consideration first: is that not plain rude, maybe even a tad hurtful, to reject someone so openly? No it’s not. If we sat beside each other on the train today I wouldn’t even recognise him. Even if I did I’d probably pretend not to and look for a seat in another carriage in case I’d have to suffer that brain-draining conversation again. So I don’t mind not having 650 Facebook friends. Jaysus, imagine having to invite them all to The Most EPIC Gaf Party EVER!!! and trying to get them all in one picture.
By: Mario Danneels
