Thoughts on Facebook’s “Change your profile picture to support Paris” feature
In the wake of Friday’s Paris attacks, Facebook gave its users the ability to update their profile pictures with overlays of the French flag.
Each time a friend changes their picture with this tool, you’ll see a helpful little button under the news item inviting you do the same. It’s incredibly easy to set up: All it takes is a few simple clicks, and you’re done. If you like, you can even let the site know when you want your normal profile picture automatically switched back.
Automation and efficiency are usually good. We like services that make our lives easier: push-to-talk, click-to-buy. But… click to grieve? Grief is a fundamentally difficult and trying experience. The act of clicking dispenses with the mindful feeling and contemplation that comes with grief.
All signs suggest that Facebook wants to keep on doing things like this. If it’s going to become customary to change our profile pictures in the wake of every major tragedy or catastrophe from now on, then that’s deeply troubling. Grief shouldn’t be this easy. By turning expressions of solidarity and sorrow into a breezy series of clicks, Facebook encourages a culture that minimizes thought and feeling in favor of the public exhibition of those things.
And what does the automatic switchback option say about tragedy? Facebook offers three options: switch my picture back in an hour; switch back in a day; switch back in a week. There’s something very grim about the acknowledged temporariness of it all. It reminds us that our attention is fleeting, our memories short. Grieving for Paris by changing your Facebook picture is like donning this season’s trends — in the blink of an eye, it will no longer be fashionable or current.
Social media has played a huge role in the wake of the attacks. But it has its limits. Facebook cannot give us that intangible, abstract mind space that we need to engage in deep introspection or grief. It seems that we’re better at creating such spaces in real life, where we frown upon crass or frivolous utterances delivered at the wrong moment.
But social media is a weightless, chaotic and fleeting jumble. Meditative think pieces and heartfelt messages jostle next to rude jokes, humblebragging status updates and pictures of cappuccinos.
It takes conscious effort to mourn the deaths of strangers. Perhaps that means pulling away from the mindless, habitual, self-absorbed lives we live on social media. To truly give pause, we need the weight of real life to ground us.
