I, like most of you I'm guessing, have all sorts of social media to which I subscribe. Hell, I started with MySpace like everybody else and went from there. I wasn't an early adopter on any of them by any stretch of the imagination, (although I've been reading Reddit for close to forever) but I was using most of them way before the BabyBoomers got their log-in, if you get my drift.
Now, before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, let me just acknowledge that it take a bit of hubris to bitch about social media on a personal blog, the whole purpose of which is to navel-gaze and yammer on about stupid or not-so-stupid shit. So yeah, I know. I know.
But have you noticed that since everyone and their uncle is on Facebook, people think "over-sharing" is the new normal? PDA (or public displays of affection as it was known back in my day...right after the continents began drifting) was something we disdained. The people we knew who put all their business out there for display were pretty much looked down upon and avoided.
Things are different today.
As soon as that little blue strip asked us what was up in our world, we began changing. And I'm not so sure for the better. It became normal to tell everyone everything and add photographic evidence of it as well. It is a curious thing.
Take for example, Lou and Barbie. (Not their real names, duh.) Lou and Barbie are newlyweds and their Facebook status updates have kept everyone informed of their love affair since day one. In 1990, neither one would have thought it was remotely interesting to tell their respective friends daily how much he/she is in love with the other one. And yet, in our newest incarnation of human behavior, this is what happens.
I'm sure you know your own Lous and Barbies. We all do. And don't get me wrong, I'm happy for them. I just don't want to watch their relationship in minutia. (I, btw, have filtered them on my FB feed so I don't actually see their posts anymore, but they still post the same stuff.)
In conversation with Barbie, I once commented on how folks use FB to share things that they previously probably wouldn't have been comfortable sharing. (It was in response to this story.) What I was trying to get at was that we have changed what we are comfortable sharing with people. We have become a nation (?) of folks taking "selfies" in our messy bathrooms and posting them on the internet, or broadcasting stuff about our lives that we normally wouldn't feel comfortable telling more than a handful of people. Barbie's response was that she likes to share with her FB "friends" all the many ways she loves Lou and the things she does with him because it's her way of spreading happiness in a world where there is too much sad stuff.
Okay, I can see that. But also, no, I can't. Because hearing how much Barbie loves Lou doesn't automatically translate into all 378 of her friends feeling happy. It translates into her 378 friends knowing that she thinks she is totally in love with Lou and wants all 378 people to know that now, with this husband, she's finally, really happy, unlike all the posts she put on FB when she was married before and only pretended to be happy and in love.
And that's our new form of PDA -- trying to convince everyone of something.
25 years ago, when Barbie was sneaking in some PDA with her first husband, it was transitory. But the internet lives forever and with it, so does our PDA. Before the era of the internet, if you made out with someone who you originally thought was totally hot but then realized was actually a total idiot, it lasted only as long as the act. (Or your friends reminded you, if they knew about it.) Post-internet and our new-found need to share everything with everyone, poor choices last a lot longer.
It makes me wonder what sociologists are going to say in about 100 years. Will they point to Facebook as a defining moment in our social development or will it ultimately blow over like an ill-advised romance? I don't know. But I do know that I am thinking more and more about what I post on Facebook.
Because really, how many of my "friends" really care what I'm eating for dinner tonight? I mean, really. How exciting is a salad to anybody?
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