2020 has now passed. I guess a lot of people did things they would never have dreamt of doing in that year. Homeschooling, drinking wine at midday on a workday, googling ‘how to turn the microphone on for Zoom’, wearing masks, bumping elbows rather than shaking hands.
I’m lucky enough to live in the
western country with the best record for managing Covid. But the pandemic has coughed
over the land of the long white cloud too. We went into lockdown in March at
the same time as I had been given what turned out to be a false cancer diagnosis.
I was put into the high-risk category and banished to the garage. I fashioned a
work station in the corner and prepared to face the world for the foreseeable
future from that lonely space on an Auckland suburban street.
One morning back in March, in
that bubble of boredom and isolation, I did something I swore I’d never do. I
signed up for Facebook and Twitter.
I’d always felt that I was initially
too old for Facebook and then too young. When it emerged in the early
naughties, I was already in my mid-thirties and still obsessed with socialising
in that old fashioned way of meeting people face to face. Facebook was used by
teenagers locked in their bedrooms and raging with hormones and desperation
to connect to the wider world.
Somewhere along the way, Facebook
became uncool for this generation. Tik Tok and Snapchat better suited their
short attention spans and when they discovered that their grannies had just
befriended them and you risked your inheritance if you continued to post pictures
of drunken orgies on a channel shared by your relatives.
Around this time, laptops and
Ipads dropped in price and they became a common Christmas present for the over
sixties, so they could email their kids who had emigrated to Australia. Email was
the entry drug but Facebook became the crack cocaine for the older generation.
Once they realised they could trace that girl they used to fancy in school fifty
years ago, they were hooked.
Clever old Facebook then filled their
timeline with racist and conspiratorially rubbish and we ended up with Trump
and Brexit. But that’s a story for another day.
When this pivot to an older
audience happened, I thought I was too young and hip to be on a crinkly’s platform.
Facebook had become uncool but I found that as well as being a forum for gossip
and racism, it was also the practical place on the internet for updates and
information. I’m a keen amateur actor and wanted to know about upcoming plays. Groups
don’t bother updating their website anymore. They just have a link saying “Check
out our Facebook page for details”.
FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, is
another term I only became familiar within 2020. Stuck in that garage in
March, I clung to the possibility of the world reopening and feared that if I
wasn’t on Facebook, I’d still there while the rest of the world partied.
There was also the added attraction
of our local community Facebook page, which along with an annoyingly high
number of cat pictures contains many hidden gems in local xenophobia and naked
racism.
I came to Twitter for different
reasons. When it launched, I was hesitant to sign up. I’m a master in coming up
with a witty retort days after it was needed. Twitter seemed to require instant
smart and clever responses. But over the years, I noticed that the mainstream media
I was consuming had become simply a conduit to Twitter. Journalists no longer
researched stories independently. They simply scrolled through Twitter and published
the best of what they found there. This accelerated in the age of Trump when
entire articles would be based on his Twitter rants.
I would read articles in the
Guardian that would link to a Twitter account. I could look at it but not see
the replies or reply myself. I knew this was Twitter trying to tease me in and
eventually I succumbed.
So, how are things now in the bright
new dawn of 2021?
This morning I deactivated my
Facebook account. It turns out there a lot of other ways to find out what’s
going on and even though I only “Friended” three groups, I was inundated with nonsense
about what people I hardly knew were having for lunch. It was like peering into
the diary of a five-year-old with similar grammar and spelling capabilities.
These were ordinary people, living ordinary lives and I had no interest in
them. The people I’m genuinely interested in, stay in touch with Whatsapp and
email and other ways of direct communication. I had no desire to seek them out on
Facebook. And I’m far too settled into domestic life to need to seek out ex-lovers
or long forgotten schoolfriends.
Facebook is a social network, but
I didn’t find it very friendly. My brief visits were peppered with hostility
and anger. In the end, we drifted apart. But like all those relationships were
you still have to share the house because you can’t afford to pay the mortgage
on your own, Facebook will always be living in the back room. Deleting it completely
is almost impossible.
Twitter on the other hand has become
invaluable. I check it five or six times a day. It’s the quickest way of getting
news and because I’ve followed smart and witty people, my timeline is filled
with clever commentary and sharp-witted responses. Facebook is full of the awful
detritus of daily life. Twitter is a window into the minds of people you like
and are interested in.
There are downsides, the need to
trawl through lots of chaff to find the wheat, the disappointment of following somebody
who turns out to be crushingly boring and the risk of being called an
anti-semite after making a badly structured joke. But if this blogging business
doesn’t make me famous, there is always the chance that micro-blogging on
Twitter will.
