Social Networking

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.