Telling My Past Self About Facebook and Social Media
My first time ever using social media was when I was around 8 or 9 and my brother had ICQ on his computer. At the time, computers weren’t something that everyone needed to have their own of. There wasn’t another one in the house, so he’d let me go on and play crappy games or burn mix cds. One day I saw that his ICQ was open and I went on and began chatting with some girl pretending to be him. I’m not sure exactly what I said, but I’m guessing it involved the word “poop” and maybe even “I love you” because that’s just the kind of thing a bratty little sister would say. Luckily, he only got a little bit mad at me and I didn’t ruin his ability to get a girlfriend.
A few years later, I got MSN. I don’t think MSN had any great amount of features but I do remember you could have profile pictures and I do remember spending a lot of time on it messaging people. I distinctly have a memory of it being a beautiful day outside and suddenly having an awareness that I was sitting in my gross basement on a computer talking to friends instead of hanging out with them at the beach or something like that. And I guess that right there is really the beginning of my online life. I haven’t downloaded anything that tells me how much time I spend on social media each day but I definitely know it is more than I wish it was. And I definitely know that there aren’t enough sunny days where I have the chance to spend it outside. Luckily smart phones have somewhat bridged this problem.
The next big social media I signed up for was something called Nexopia when I was around 13. I think I only used it for a year. It was basically a wall where I’d post song lyrics from Red Hot Chili Peppers or Beastie Boys and then you could upload I think 8 pictures in total. And I remember it took forever for the pictures to upload. I remember waiting literally hours for my 8 stupid pictures to change over. I think a year or so later, I got Facebook. My sister told me to get it so I could see the pictures she took while she was away at university. Eventually my friends started getting it and now it’s a seemingly inescapable part of my life.
What would I say to my younger self about social media, specifically Facebook?
You cannot fathom at this moment how big this thing is going to be.
One day you will regret how much time you spend on it but you will have difficulty managing that.
One day you will go through a rough patch and take three months off of it and it will be amazing.
One day it will be perfectly normal to practically stalk complete strangers online, except they will call it lurking. And you will do it with other people as a social activity.
One day you will start a Facebook group for a hobby that you never actually learned how to do and it will have thousands of people in it. But sometimes those people are actually robots or maybe just people who are professional spammers and they will try to put links to bestiality porn on every post in your sweet, innocent crafting group and you cannot fathom for the life of you what the point of that was for them.
One day you will be told you can’t use your online alias on there anymore. You will be told that you have to provide government photo identification to Facebook so that you can prove who you say you are and resume using your account. After all, why would they ever trust someone who spent years pretending they were a millionaire entrepreneurial Swedish salmon named Radnar? What does that last sentence even mean? One day you’ll know.
You can’t actually fully delete your account or things you’ve posted on it so be more thoughtful about what you do put on there.
One day there will be a “remember this” feature, which will prompt you to delete joke statuses you made as a teenager because you’re worried someone will go back and judge you on a dumb thing you said ten years ago.
One day you will anxiously go through and make sure to delete every picture where you look particularly drunk or are smoking weed.
One day marijuana will be legal and no one will care that you put pictures of yourself smoking it online.
One day an employer will say they hired you because they weren’t able to find your account.
Another day you will be told that you won’t get a job if people can’t find your account.
One day everyone will talk about themselves like they are a business and call it “your personal brand”. And you will hate this because you’re just an average person and you don’t feel like the world needs you as a brand. But you have to do it because otherwise you aren’t properly participating in society like a normal person. But you will also feel like this is just a covert way that we’re trying to reframe and gloss over the fact that social services are dwindling and we no longer have the supports that actual businesses used to offer their employees because everyone is moving to precarious contract work. But it’s your responsibility now because once again, you are now a business. People will say it’s the business of being your authentic self or the self that you want the world to see and that you must leverage social media to help you do it. You won’t buy it.
One day people will get most of their news from it but there will be this issue with a lot of that news being fake and then that fake news apparently will be responsible for electing a psychopathic reality TV star as US president. And then a few minutes ago you will read on Facebook about how that reality TV star keeps doing things that look like an instigation of WW3. Also, he hangs out with Nazis and his press secretary said earlier today that Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons on his own people and you will facepalm and say wtfffff (that means you exasperatedly covered your face and then said what the fuck in futurespeak).
One day there will be this phenomenon of topical inside jokes that everyone participates in called memes and you will actually be pretty down with memes. Here’s one you decided to share yesterday:
One day you will actually take a university course on social media and it will surprise you how much you enjoyed it. (They also have university courses on Beyonce just not at the one you end up going to…also Beyonce will be a way bigger deal than you ever predicted)
