How I confused 500 people on Facebook…
…and why it actually matters
In the last week of October I got engaged… well, kind of. Don’t start to congratulate me. It was a fake engagement, but a real thing for more than 500 people on Facebook. On that day I realised how much impact Facebook has on our offline relationship and how careful I should be about social media in general.
How I got engaged
It was a late Saturday night in Amsterdam. I was literally doing nothing when Ondra (man I was engaged to for 12h on Facebook) posted on his Facebook wall, that he is engaged. Knowing him, I realised that it is a joke, but decided to double check. Long story short we figured out that engaging to me is a good extension of the story. It was easy to make the story believable: we are good friends, we have a lot of common pictures on Facebook, we hang out a lot together when we are in the same city.
At 10pm I posted “Olya Steidl engaged to Ondrej Kratky”. We agreed to keep the buzz going for 12h and then I had an honour to break his heart officially on Facebook. How cool is that? I didn’t know what will start after that.
We both found it funny. Being very cynical about social media we wanted to see what is going to happen, but the result surprised us.
That night when I posted that joke “Olga is engaged” I really thought they would get it. Come on, we all are so open and so transparent on the social media. Our sarcasm, our personality cloves through our posts.
Not at all…
It was a joke
What apparently Facebook did that night, is made sure, every single person I know gets that memo: push notifications on mobile phones, emails, featuring on the newsfeed. In 12h me and Ondra collectively got more than 500 likes, more than 100 comments and 30 personal messages and calls. I never had such a successful Facebook update.
People believed Facebook…
My real friends believed Facebook as well. Not all of them, but majority was definitely confused.
So many people got confused, even more got offended when the next day I told them “it was a joke”.
A very angry message came my way “Do you think you can manipulate people like this?”.
The other message that was constantly repeating was “People won’t believe you next time”. Next time you won’t get as many likes. People won’t leave a comment….
Why it actually matters
Before we pulled this joke I had a very one sided understanding of the Facebook reality. Believed everything on Facebook is fake and for many people their social behaviour and persona is above everything. We all broadcast our reality via social channels and consume it with a filter of happiness Facebook is providing us with. We all try to decide very quickly who the other person is and what he or she is like (confession to make: I do it too).
Apparently I was wrong, but let me first explain you why I felt so:
I have a Facebook allergy
When i was little I was very confused by my mother telling her girlfriends my personal news. When I wanted to share something with a friend of mine usually she knew the news before hand, cause my mother told her mother and her mother told her. That’s exactly how I feel about Facebook and posting on Facebook.
Earlier this year I also took 4 days off internet to completely recharge my batteries after 8 years of dating my own smartphone. Later I deleted all apps that were constantly pulling me back to my phone. If you look at my mobile home screen right now you will notice, that I don’t have:
- Any Facebook related apps
- Swarm
- Email clients
- Even browser (ask me how to switch it off, it’s tricky)
I decided that I don’t want to consume my world through the internet infinity and I try to stay true to that.
I’m very privately open on Facebook. Facebook is a work related tool for me. I share my opinion, I share my project, I never share my personal things (my friends do that for me sometimes). I know I’m not a typical Facebook user, but that’s how I see it.
I don’t want to stalk people on Facebook or make any assumptions about my contacts based on their Facebook walls.
In my world all social platforms are just a fake happiness filter and substitute common sense to us.
Remember — I don’t have a (!) browser on my smartphone. I would never post my engagement announcement on Saturday night right after that happened and for sure I would never sit with my FB page open and count likes if that were for real. I thought it is quite obvious, but I was wrong.
The other side of Facebook
This story made me think and share it with many people around me. I couldn’t possibly understand what is going on. Why do people I value get so upset about my very obvious joke?
A lot of my contacts I bumped into weeks later had meaningful discussions with me about their personal experiences on the topic of social media, some business partners came back to me with new projects, some people just wanted to say hi and now they had a reason for it. They though I was authentic this time and were very happy to break the ice.
For some of my contacts that was a big deal to let me be their Facebook friends.
That was a very conscious decision to let me be a part of their life and their personal stories. To let me see their newborn babies and vacations, their happy moments and reunions with old friends. For them Facebook is a tool to connect to their beloved once and share an opinion. And I hurt them by being disrespectful to their privacy.
And I sincerely apologise for that.
The clash of clans
As I learned in the last 3 weeks — I need to be even more careful about my social network behaviour and expression my public opinion about Facebook as a social platform. And on the other side people that really rely on Facebook as the tool to connect to other people should be very conscious what kind of reality we have created and what answers they might get from the Facebook audience.
Facebook is not a media
Facebook is not a new media and not the type of media you need to believe in without questioning it.
Traditional media try to scare us: world is doomed, and you need to be happy you are in a safe place drinking your Coke.
Social platforms show us how everyone around us is happy and we personally suck. I don’t vote for any of these two. I wonder if there is something “real” coming.
Facebook decides for us what matters
According to Facebook you deserve being heard only when you get engaged, get married or have a baby.
But what about women that don’t want to have kids? Or men that don’t see themselves being married? Aren’t we showing the teenagers that according to social media forming a meaningless relationship is much more important than actually staying true to yourself?
Facebook decides how should we feel
Additionally we become extremely afraid to be sad and start to develop a fake always happy persona and immediately after that anxiety attacks. This is not random Facebook, YouTube, Twitter audience that affects our kids and teenagers. This is entirely our fault.
I have never thought a Saturday night joke will teach me so much. I believe that if we all start to respect authenticity of every person on the platform and be very careful about liking, commenting and sharing things we might fix bad influence of social media on our life.
What I want you to remember:
“A personal story is not an elevator pitch”
Each and every one of us has happy and sad moments to share, has the right to say that their day sucked and that they are not sure whether they want to live traditional life style. We are all different and it is beautiful.
Feel free to connect with me on Twitter and share your personal experience and comments: @olgasteidl
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