A Domino Effect

“Facebook is, after all, characterized by the very public curation of one’s assets in the form of friends, photos, biographical data, accomplishments, pithy observations, even the books we say we like. Look, we have baked beautiful cookies. We are playing with a new puppy. We are smiling in pictures (or, if we are moody, we are artfully moody.) Blandness will not do, and with some exceptions, sad stuff doesn’t make the cut, either.”

Lord have I written about my uneasy feelings towards Facebook before.  But I’m bringing it up again, mainly because I’ve now got statistics to back up my assertion (and it’s not just my assertion) that the jolly old world of Facebook actually does make people unhappy.  Read this article if you’re still unconvinced.

Everyone knows how this goes (and if they say they don’t, I would be heavily tempted to disbelieve them).  You log on to Facebook feeling OK, you log off again some time later feeling utterly miserable.  Everyone seems happier than you.  Everyone is more successful.  Everyone looks so much prettier.  These feelings can persist even if you know the truth of the matter, which is that everyone seems happier because very few people update Facebook when they are sad, that everyone seems more successful because Facebook is a place where people talk themselves up but rarely down, and that everyone seems prettier on Facebook because they spent/wasted a long time posing for photographs and then re-taking them until they looked perfect.

Contrary to what some people think, I genuinely don’t believe that the architecture of the Facebook site has much to do with the “look at me, look at me” phenomenon.  While yes, a “dislike” button could certainly make things more interesting, I doubt it would change the way people react to Facebook in a big way.  Even in its present form, you could quite easily use the site to write about how very unhappy you are, it’s just that very few people actually do that (just on a side note, I think the term “artfully moody” does wonders for describing the way some people go about presenting themselves…).

I think the problem we have with Facebook boils down to the way we as the mass users of the system have chosen to interpret and apply it.  We’ve chosen to make Facebook a place where people over-egg the truth to make themselves sound more interesting; where people only post “good” photos of themselves as opposed to “real” (which would inevitably include “bad”) photos.  As a social experiment, Facebook could have been really interesting.  As it is, it’s become little more than a soap opera, the only difference being the fact that you actually do know some of the characters.  Not that we should blame ourselves for this: humans are naturally programmed to compete with and try to outdo one another.  All Facebook has done is provide us with new and different tools for the job.

Of course the natural reaction to any grumbling by anyone about Facebook is “just leave then”.  And in a sense, it is the easy option.  In my experience, however, leaving Facebook, or even heavily cutting down on your exposure to it is starting to mean that you really can miss out.  Not on banal status updates that you’d rather not read anyway, but on gatherings and events that you might actually want to be involved in.  Lots of my friends now use Facebook as their primary method of organising things, meaning that if I don’t pick up an invitation there then it’s possible that I could miss out on whatever it is completely.  I myself have used Facebook to arrange meetings and such with friends mainly because, as much as it pains me to admit it, it’s just easier to do it that way, especially if, like me, your life management skills are lacking and you don’t have every one of your friends’ private email addresses.

There’s also the sense of attachment to people you might otherwise never see again.  For anyone who has travelled, or known people only for a short time in a particular context, getting rid of Facebook means getting rid of contact with people you’re unlikely ever to be in touch with again otherwise.  There’s no doubting the business genius of Facebook – whether we like it or not, it has managed to wedge itself somewhere within our emotional makeup, meaning that for lots of people, separation would entail leaving someone or something significant behind.

So Facebook stays, for me and I guess for many others too.  But my doses of it are limited.  The people I really do care about will tell me their news in person when I see them, the people I was at school with ten years ago but never see won’t.  And that’s fine, mainly because I don’t care.  If I wanted to have a meaningful relationship with these people then I would.  As it is, I’m happy to let them live in my past and on my Facebook feed, which, as my usage of the site dwindles, is looking increasingly past-centric.

A parting thought, then.  The next time you’re on Facebook, reading about someone’s “amazing” life, remember this: a heavy Facebook presence means nothing more and nothing less than a person spends a lot of time on Facebook.  It does not mean that they are any more happy than you.  It doesn’t mean they are more successful than you.  And it certainly doesn’t mean that they use their time as wisely as you!  Because every minute spent on Facebook is a minute not spent doing something that is actually awesome and might one day be worth writing about.  I remind myself of this every time I go on the site, because the people I look up to most in my life are never on the thing.  They are writing PhDs, planning round the world trips, working in their communities and building canoes.  These people don’t have time to write about how they made macaroni and cheese for dinner or to indulge their narcissistic sides by posting “perfect” photos of themselves.  They don’t have time because they are actually out doing the living, as opposed to writing about doing the living on Facebook.

I know which camp I’d rather pitch my tent in.

Image above from here.

Some of you might have noticed that the blog has undergone a wee transformation over the past couple of days.  The result?  Thrifty Chick is now A Domino Effect, complete with a brand new look, a brand new domain and brand new, well nothing else really.  See, that was sort of the point.

I started blogging almost two years ago now, and while it might not be all that noticeable to others, I certainly feel that the tone and the subject matter of the blog have undergone some pretty significant changes during that time.  When I started writing here, all I wanted to talk about was thrift: reusing, recycling, saving pennies etc.  These days, while I still enjoy scribbling the odd money-saving post, my interests are far wider.  I want to talk about things that aren’t related to money in the slightest way, which I suppose is a reflection of the progression of my feelings on the matter in a wider sense.  While I was never by any means obsessed with saving, I have come to appreciate that money is but a very tiny part of life.  While saving it for doing good stuff as opposed to frittering it away on crap magazines and junk clothing is undoubtedly a good practice, there’s so much else that I want to write about these days that advertising my blog as one that’s all about personal finance is, I think, doing it a bit of a disservice.  There’s so much else that I’m thinking about and occasionally committing to screen, and I want my internet space to be more capable of reflecting that other stuff than to date I think it has been.

So.  A Domino Effect it is.  There’s no explanation behind the new name, other than it popped into my head while I was at a gig a couple of weeks ago where I saw a set of stage lights that looked just like a domino.  To be honest, it’s just what I was looking for: slightly random and incapable of being nailed firmly into any one category.  There will be no change to the current posting format so please, don’t delete me from your readers in a burst of change-phobic delirium!  I’m still here, I’m still me, just with a better name, a cuter design and a brand new canvas.  Now, where were we…

Image above from here.

I know this thing has done the rounds of the blogosphere and twitter etc over the past few days, but I thought I’d share my own tuppenceworth, for the sake of getting it off of my chest, if nothing else.

Well first things first, until roughly 18 months or so ago I was pretty much immune to the whole PC/Mac debate – in fact, I didn’t even know it existed.  So that leads me to thinking that there must be thousands of others out there who are quite comfortably letting the entire thing blow over their heads.  And that’s a good thing.  Because if we are to understand one of the most basic contentions of the anti-Apple contingent, there’s nothing that many (not all, obviously) Mac users like better than a litte (or a lot) of attention.  So I’m not going to prattle on and on about the intricacies of this quite fascinating topic, although I will just say for clarity’s sake that my own personal predilections lean quite strongly away from Apple and all it appears to have to offer us.

The truth is, I don’t really care too much about what kind of computer someone else uses and I sincerely hope that I’m not a shallow enough being to judge someone else purely on what kind of mobile they text from.  But the iPad, Apple’s latest ‘baby’ has really riled me for one particular reason, and that particular reason is the following: it has no function that perfectly acceptable technology (Apple technology, if that’s what floats your boat) doesn’t already provide by the bucketload.

Let me elaborate.  Computers, I get.  They are incredibly useful things, and the internet has proved itself, in my humble, technologically-infantile opinion, to be a quite wonderful creation.  To give one rather obvious example, young aspiring writers like myself are able to communicate with an audience that is potentially global: no computer + no internet = no Thrifty Chick = sad face.  The same goes for mobile phones, which have changed forever the way those of us who are privileged enough to own one communicate.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say I can’t imagine my life without my phone, and I do have the occasional (or the not-so-occasional) pang of regret that it makes me perpetually contactable unless I choose to switch it off, but on the whole, I’m generally pro-mobile.

I completely and utterly fail, however, to grasp the selling point of the iPad, this thing that is destined to change our lives for the better.  I have a TV.  I have a computer.  I have a mobile phone.  I have a collection of books.  I have membership of my local library.  Where is this gaping hole in my technological and literary portfolio that the iPad claims it can fill?  Oh, silly me, there it is.  I completely forgot how much I want to be able to sit in front of Eastenders whilst simutaneously using both hands to hold the device that will allow me to tweet the following pile of drivel: ‘Rebecca is watching TV and surfing the internet at the same time’.

The idea that the iPad will allow us to read ‘iBooks’ is probably the one that grates on me most forcefully (although to be fair the e-book phenomenon cannot by any means be solely attributed to Apple).  Reading is one of the most inclusive and thrifty of past times: library membership is free, and books are cheap, especially when bought second-hand.  There’s something ridiculously nice about reading a good book and then passing it on to a friend: ‘I read this, and I think you’ll really enjoy it.  Here, take it right now and start reading’.  Not ‘I read a really great e-book last week, remind me later to e-mail it to you’.

The other thing that really worries me about the e-book phenomenon, which Apple, with the iBook is contributing massively to, are the subliminal messages they are sending to children – the idea that reading is only ‘cool’ if you’re doing it on an iPad, or other similar device, and if you don’t have one then sorry mate, but you just don’t fit in.  What was once a universal, open-to-all activity is gradually being dismantled and re-built along competitive class lines in the same way that so much of our daily lives have been.  I find this facet of what Apple are trying to do with the iPad particularly difficult to swallow.

There’s a lot more I could say on this (the fact that this life-changing miracle is only available to those with $500 to spare for one), but I might just end up feeling miserable.  So, for now, I direct you to a hilarious piece of writing by Charlie Brooker in the Guardian, as well as a cute but witty sketch by The Daily Mash.

Image available courtesy of Flickr: cattias.photos.  Thanks also go to Lauro for alerting me to both of these articles, and for my continuing technological education.