From poke to meet: my Facebook life in five snapshots

5x5 How has my life become intertwined in Facebook over the past 11 years, and what does it say for the future of the social network?

The death of Facebook has been predicted more often than the end of the world: it was going to be replaced by Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Snapchat and Instagram; peak Facebook was the beginning of the end; young people don’t want to use it; people will be turned off by being fed fake news, having their data farmed, and being manipulated; smartphone addiction fears will lead to mass account deletion.

More often than not, Facebook’s recommendations come across as desperately hopeful.

None of these predictions turned out to be true, and I’ll go out on a limb to predict that data farming and manipulation won’t destroy Facebook, either. For better or for worse, the facility of Facebook still outweighs its risks for most users, and it’s become an integral part of our lives. When there’s a crisis, Facebook will offer just enough action for us to shrug and go back to our feeds.

So I thought I’d look at how that’s happened through my interaction with Facebook. It might shed an insight, or like all anecdotal evidence it could be a disposable outlier.

Good food, bad hair. So much bad hair.

1 Poke. I joined Facebook in June 2007, probably after a period of moaning that it was full of unbearable wankers (see also Twitter and Instagram). It was a heady time of poking people and then making friends with them, unfiltered commenting and thoughtless photo uploads. Despite the poor quality of early smartphone cameras, I unwittingly began to document years of terrible hair decisions but never noticed how bad they were.

A lot of time was wasted on this (thanks, Zynga)

2 Play. I first began to carelessly hand over my online data when I started playing Zombies vs Ninjas vs Pirates vs Jedi vs Sith, just a few months after joining Facebook. Later I moved to more sophisticated games like Words With Friends while mocking those proles who played Farmville. Apparently Scrabulous is still going, as Lexulous.

Eventually my smartphone become powerful enough to play games without Facebook, and now the games just ask me to post about them on Facebook. As an Android user, Google Play gets my login data instead. Is that any better?

Bad photos of bad food. It’s what social media was made for in 2010.

3 Eat. The foodcam craze arrived early and stayed for a long time. I even had a Foodcam photo album (not updated much since 2012). And who doesn’t want to see a Thunderbirds-themed meal from a Tokyo theme bar? Looking at that photo, the better question was who wanted to eat it?

But most of my foodcam pics aren’t exotic dishes shot at bad angles in poor lighting, they’re mundane meals that reflect nothing more than a tickly need to bag a few dopamine-inducing likes. If it was tasty at the time, it doesn’t often look it now.

This is where Cambridge Analytica poked its noses into our lives.

4 Login. Facebook isn’t the only kind of social login, but it has become the default alternative to creating a fresh password for every new site. I have a lot of Facebook logins, more than through Google I’d guess, and even though I’ve trimmed their permissions I’m loathe to give up their simplicity.

It’s convenient and — even now — more secure than the still-popular option of reusing the same password for everything, but it comes at a cost if you’re not careful. Even though Facebook offers anonymous logins for third-party apps, many services try to harvest all your data.

This is where the price of free becomes apparent: you are the product, and they want not just your public profile but your friends list, your posts, and the ability to post on your behalf. It’s the doorway that gave Cambridge Analytica a way to know us better than we know ourselves. Just say no, kids.

SpaceX Unofficial, the group I can talk about.

5 Meet. Curmudgeon that I am, I don’t use Facebook for that much endless chat or commentardery, but circumstances recently showed me how useful it is for talking about a subject that just doesn’t fit your general friends and family. There are lots of other places to chat online, but whether you’re fighting against equal rights on a Britain First-alike closed group, lecturing on wokeness in the Women’s March group, asking question on a brand’s page or discussing your favourite 70s sweet flavours, Facebook provides an incredible platform for discussion in open and closed environments.

But even closed and secret groups aren’t entirely secure. Facebook’s copyright bots can scour them for infringing content and report them to copyright owners, and governments can request Facebook to turn over user information, take down content or even shut down groups of any kind.

Are communities enough to keep Facebook alive? Perhaps no more than the ability to show the world that you continue to have children or that your opinions can be neatly expressed in memes. Yet they’re a deep level of engagement that makes simply deleting your account more than simply opting out of the newsfeed or creating your own logins for the alternative forums you’ll need to stay in these groups without it.

I’m not championing Facebook. I don’t even think it’s a necessary evil. It’s just another giant tech corporation run by an ethically semi-detached kidult, pretending he’s a harmless nerd. The pressures that make it a bit evil are the same that will corrupt whatever comes next, unless society changes on a much greater scale.