AT one point in time, I was in the grip of a diary habit so forceful that documenting my daily activities in detail left me with little time to do anything else. The ironic outcome you’ll already have guessed: within no time, I had nothing to record beyond ‘wrote my diary’.
This rather forlorn little episode took on new significance the other day when I realised that, along with SAD and some other nagging, low-level January virus that we’ll call feeling utterly fed up, I had developed Facebook fatigue.
There was no specific trigger, just that sense of heavy emptiness which drops in to tell you that the writing is on the wall (sorry) for your relationship. I just couldn’t be bothered uploading a batch of holiday photos or checking out a band that someone said should be more famous. The thrill had gone.
It doesn’t help that post-Christmas Facebook has been as lively as a burst balloon; then again, no one can be blamed for that. We’ve all had too much else on our minds lately – work, debts, break-ups, detoxes – to concentrate on popping on a ruff and engaging in devastating online banter.
No, the malaise runs deeper than that. I think it may simply be a chronic case of too much information.
For some, it’s the deployment of this information which is the issue; a number of people I know say that they’ll deactivate or delete their accounts when the non-elective conversion of everyone’s profiles to the Timeline format takes place.
Unless I am mistaken, all this does is rearrange your existing personal contribution, making Facebook annoying rather than invasive. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, as they say, and legally speaking, Zuckerberg is probably allowed to Photoshop bowler hats and moustaches on to everyone’s profile pictures without fear of reprisal.
Apart from the fear of accidental regression, I’m not overly bothered by Timeline; the worst its emphatically linear structure can do to me is expose a complete lack of narrative trajectory in my life (December 2010: Having a coffee.....February 2012: Having a coffee). However, antipathy towards it does seem to have fed into a more diffuse feeling that Facebook has somehow jumped the shark, even as it sets sail on the stock market. But is it just Facebook or are we tiring of life online itself?
Just recently, there was a wonderfully pointless debate on the Jeremy Vine Show about whether Facebook or Twitter was ‘best’, which is sort of like arguing over whether metal is better than wood. Each was designed with a different purpose in mind and has its respective merits, depending on what you wish to gain from them.
Facebook, of course, works best as a social hub; it’s the online equivalent of a student union bar. Twitter is a truly useful professional tool and a powerful newsvine. It is also nakedly individualist; despite the maxim ‘join the conversation’, Twitter really consists of millions of concurrent monologues (or micro-blogging, as it’s known).
There’s an invisible hierarchy at work on Twitter: in the same sense that money attracts money, the people most listened to on Twitter are those whose voices are already recognised. I often feel like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited: outwardly on the right side of the glass but still pressing my nose to it, painfully aware of my own brown feathers in a room of gilded creatures. The room, nonetheless, is an inspiring and entertaining place to be, particularly if you like eavesdropping on the public-private thoughts of people you’ll never meet but rather admire.
Facebook, despite being communal in spirit, is still home to a competitive ooze. For every person who posts something like, ‘so p***ed off right now!’, inviting their 1,736 friends to enquire the reason why, there are too many outbreaks of ‘my life is so fabulous in every way that if it becomes any more perfect, I will implode’.
Proving the old adage ‘laugh and the world laughs with you’, these are the posts that receive multiple Likes; whether this is because we’re taking genuine pleasure in our friends’ success, eager to look gracious or hitching our wagon to a star, who can say? But Facebook seems to run on twin engines of smugness and insecurity.
Personally, I think I’ve just reached my saturation point with transforming every scrap of experienced life into multimedia mementos for others to share.
I know we’re told from primary school upwards that it’s good to share (and, yes, I feel guilty every time I make a Share Bag of cheese and onion crisps disappear single-handedly) but a little discernment, a little withholding, doesn’t go amiss. I’m delighted to hear about your new baby, not so much about the AMAZING sandwich you made half an hour ago. Veni, vidi, vici is not enough anymore; now you have to have Shared, Tagged, Liked as well.
Great if you’ve got the mental stamina for it but I struggle enough with simply doing. Thank god the Victorians didn’t have Facebook, that’s all I can say.
When did it happen? When did we begin to feel comfortable with turning our insides out and handing them over to the internet for safe keeping? We now use Facebook, Tumblr et al not only as platforms for self-expression but online storage facilities for our impressions and memories.
As with clever cars which present you with your seatbelt and helpfully tell you when you’re about to knock over a pensioner, I wonder if, with this practice, we’re in danger of reducing the capacity of our brains to hold that information?
Don’t you wonder, too, what we’d be doing if we weren’t gazing at each others’ navels on a screen? Nicola Roberts, the Wise One from Girls Aloud, was on to something when, having been asked in an interview to define the Noughties as a colour, said, “white. Something bland....It would be white with small dots to symbolise small things that have happened”.
While I seem to recall that some fairly big ‘things’ did happen in the last decade, her intuitive sense that some kind of cultural diminution had taken place was, if you’ll pardon the pun, spot on.
And what of the future? Will people – as certain pundits have suggested – turn their backs on social networking and blogging in pursuit of a life lived more ‘authentically’. Or are our second selves here to stay?
Predictions not being my strong point, I shall go and make a fresh coffee, and pose the question on Twitter.