Facebook: 10 years of trying to be liked

Facebook: 10 years of trying to be liked

It's the social media site's birthday. Time to face up to reality – I'm in love with the projection of my own desired life

Hannah Slapper

theguardian.com, Monday 3 February 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/03/facebook-10-years-projection-life-social-media

Ten years ago this week, on 4 February 2004, Mark Zuckerberg changed the course of western socialisation by putting thefacebook.com on the internet. If this was a film, we would now be enjoying a super-fast montage of millions of people clicking through the past 10 years; uploading pictures, poking and preening their online profiles until we got to today: a day when a substantial amount of Facebook's one billion users will check into their online life.

I joined Facebook just before my 18th birthday, in 2007, so psychologically I associate my pre-FB life with childhood, and my post-FB life with adulthood.

The whole concept of Facebook perfectly spoons the student lifestyle. You can share your pretentious thoughts, upload your many #gpoy (that's gratuitous pictures of yourself) and basically shout about all your drinking, drug-taking and the French philosophy you're reading.

My first Facebook status, as an A-level student, was: "Hannah is wondering where her legwarmer is. Does any member of the canteen crew have it?" My next, only two months into my first term as a UCL English student, was: "(terms and conditions apply)." Don't worry, I hate myself too.

As any graduate will remember, those years at university were just as much about juggling a melee of friendships as it was about studying. Facebook allowed me to interact with Danny from my course as much as it allowed me to stalk/check out that potential psychopath I met on Tottenham Court Road, while organising birthday drinks with the girls from my halls. At the time I felt like master of my universe. In hindsight, I just look like the worst person in the universe. There are hundreds of pictures of me, mouth open, holding a bottle of sparkling wine, smiling with eyes-akimbo in the middle of Roxy. Videos where I "down" a bottle of ketchup "for a laugh". Talking about my Lolcats and Bumper Sticker applications (remember Facebook apps?).

The comforting fact is that many of the people I know are in the same boat. They've turned into (vaguely) respectable adults who do not offend me with their internet behaviour, but lurking beneath their recently tagged holiday photos and refreshingly witty picture captions there are albums upon albums of evidence that they were, in fact, once 19 years old and an embarrassing person.

This is where it starts to get chilling. After a recent watch of Spike Jonze's Her, it suddenly dawned on me that sharing my life on this particular social media platform was an unquestioned and essential part of my life, just like breathing and eating. There's a moment in that film when Joaquin Phoenix's character suddenly realises that everyone around him is talking to their artificial intelligence operating systems and not to each other. When I realised that, for me, Facebook was socially intravenous, I'm pretty sure I had the same look of wonder and horror on my face.

We've lived through so many of Facebook's design changes over the years, from mutual friends to "liking" pages, and from cover photos to the view-as feature. The most significant, however, has to be the timeline. Back in 2011, when this was being implemented, all we did was complain that it looked ugly, but the social implications of this redesign are enormous. Facebook had realised that people were using their platform to share the most significant moments of their life, and they needed a way to highlight this.

Got engaged? I bet you thought about how you were going to announce it. Had a baby? Chances are you were asked for pictures, and got an obscene amount of likes for posting photos of your new bundle of joy. It doesn't even have to be as obvious as that. I recently went through a breakup and had a conversation with a friend about how I could let people know in a subtle way. Don't even get me started on the treasure trove of memories that I had collected over our five years together – all just sitting there, captured in a time of happiness and yet pregnant with the inevitability of the future.

Why do I, and millions of other people all over the world feel this need to compulsively share every moment of our lives in this carefully crafted way? There's none of the immediacy of Twitter or the ponderous thought put into a blog post. Facebook has created a new thing: lifestyleism. I'm guilty of it, as are all of you. I want people to think I'm a cool London writer, going out and being "in my 20s". I don't want people to know I sit on my bedroom floor on a Friday night and order two pizzas while watching Nothing To Declare and scrolling through Tinder. So I update my profile picture regularly, I choose a cover image that will make people laugh. I think carefully about my status updates and ensure they'll garner a few likes, maybe even a few comments.

Although I might not be quite ready for it now, I'm gradually realising that this needs to stop. How on earth am I going to become the person I want to be if it's this easy to trick everyone into thinking that I'm already there? I'm in love with an operating system, just like Spike Jonze imagined, but the object of my affections is the projection of my own desired life, and that is a more than enough reason to delete it forever and turn my head towards the entrance of Plato's cave.