‘Read at 21.03’ ‘Last seen at 22.56’
Not only does modern day living tinge any interaction with the 12 hour clock with quaint nostalgia, but regardless whether Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, or iMessage is your bag we are more connected than ever, and that makes our social lives faster, more dynamic, but also more anxiety-inducing.
We are all glued to our phones, ready for the next Tweet, Instagram post, or the Tinder date of our dreams. Yet this constant social ebb and flow can often become a deluge of information where you can end up feeling trapped. There is no excuse to miss your friend’s birthday party invitation, even if leaving the house is the last thing you want to do. You can’t accidentally miss that email that your boss sent you at 20.47, because you have e-mails on your phone. You are at the beck and call of everyone who has your contact details, which with Facebook can be as little as your name.
What’s worse? A day can be ruined when a friend, or let’s be honest potential amour, doesn’t reply to your casual, but perfectly constructed, witty message that ended with an offhand reference to a drink and a (now stark) question mark (thank God you didn’t put that ‘x’). This simple piece of punctuation aptly reflects the existential haze which hangs over your social life and weirdly reminds of the curve of the reaper’s scythe…(too far?) The silence is exacerbated by the ‘Read at 09.30’ that is apparently enough to warrant eating a whole bag of giant chocolate buttons at your desk. Fuck it, two. The efficiency of the platform, informing you with passive aggressive kindness that you are being ignored, makes you start to wonder if this is your life now – loneliness with only an automated message to remind you you are alive.
This inability to escape has just got more 1984 through the development of Google Chrome ‘Marauders Map’, whose name creepily allowed it to hide behind the child-friendly Harry Potter cloak, but actually used Facebook’s Messenger app to allow you to track any of your friends to an exact location. Although created by a soon-to-be Facebook intern this underlines our society’s obsession with technology, and the way that that know-how can turn sour. If it hadn’t been stopped the platform would have actually made every user’s favourite pastime of ‘Facebook stalking’ just that – stalking.
The thing is, as an avid stalker, I can waste many hours looking through the holiday photos of a girl I used to sit next to in English but no longer talk to, through human interest and a sick desire to compare our lives regardless of whether I come out the worse. Yet this is just. too. much. I don’t need to know where friends are. It would merely be another string of anxiety to my already fraying bow, which has already been tensed by the realisation that the temptation to track a friend’s location would definitely get the better of me.
So this brings me to my point, does social media actually have the power to make us bad friends? Voyeuristically following the lives and loves of acquaintances in silence (or with a rogue like here or there), or un-reading messages from good friends until we feel like it. As we are given the means to break through that final breach of trust – location – are we steadily un-learning how to communicate?
It seems like that is the case, but the lure of Facebook is that it taps into social human instincts so strong that it has managed to survive without suffering an en masse account deactivation cull. The reasoning seems to be that you may have to wait for your friend to reply, but you can surf through your memories, or those of relative strangers, as you wait…or soon you will be able to find out where they are hiding (because they are hiding) like the pseudo-spy that you are.
Don’t get me wrong I’m still on there, but I’m watching, Facebook.
one way to eat an orange 