Ollie's Modern Life #23

Right, that’s it. I’m quitting social media. I just had a look and there is nothing there aside from nonsense, football and sexual predators. I’m serious. I’m doing it now, watch. See, Facebook, gone, forever. Kind of. I’ve deleted the app anyway and Instagram, an app so up its own arse that pretty soon it’ll just be posting pictures of itself doing yoga poses and sitting on a crowded beach in Benidorm that looks like an empty beach in the Caribbean thanks to a handy filter and some millennial level cropping skills! *Takes breath*.  

And I’m not the only one. I overheard a conversation between two blokes in their 50s the other day who have clocked onto to the fact that generally speaking, social networks are full of heavily filtered fakery that no one should take seriously. Their chat had a somber undertone. The observation was sparked by news of a 16 year old boy who had taken his own life by jumping off a cliff on the island of Portland. As one of the chaps rightly pointed out “when I was 16 all I cared about was getting my end wet”. Granted, he could have been more eloquent, but his point was valid. We shouldn’t be living in a world where 16 year old kids are taking their own life.

That tragic story had far more going on than simply a youngster getting depressed because of Facebook, but I suspect social media played a part in the state of his mental health. Even if it didn’t or there is no proof that it did, the fact that two men in their 50s, a generation nonnative to the social media uprising, acknowledged the potential impact of social networks on mental health, was in itself, telling.

We’ve all experienced it in small doses. We can feel ourselves bubbling up with jealousy when we see our friends riding wild horses in Iceland (*See Ferment Issue 17 “FOMO”) and for a long time we’ve known that something isn’t quite right. Why do we feel this way?

Who’s making us feel this way? Is this a problem? In short, yes. Yes, it is.

Every year since 2009 social media mogul and flip flop wearer Mark Suckerberg (they spell it with a “z” in the states”) sets himself a new year’s resolution. Previous years have included billionaire bollocks like wearing a tie every day and visiting every state in, you guessed it, the

States. YAWN! This year, however, he has decided that he’s going to, once and for all, “fix facebook” – proof, for me at least, that it is and has been for a long time, broken.

In his post, he says “The world feels anxious and divided”. No shit. He goes on to say that these issues cover “history, civics, political philosophy, media, government, and of course technology”. He’s aware that there is a problem, that people are noticing something isn’t quite right and that they are not all feeling like they used to. Despite this, it’s a weak dmission. He should be saying “look, we fucked up. We preyed on the weakness of the human psyche for profit and for that, we are sorry. We’re gonna delete it but you can keep your photos.”

There is no doubt that Facebook and other social networks can be used as a force for good, but don’t you ever think that life would be so much better without it? More full and focused than spread out and weak? I can almost remember life without it, but only almost. My brain’s ability to remember stuff has gone to shit in recent years, I think in part thanks to social media.

Thankfully Netflix has just released the entire collection of “Friends” and, regardless of what you think of it as a sitcom, it’s a gentle reminder of just how much our lives had changed in a very short space of time indeed. They use landlines, call up and meet their friends and take photos with a camera, stuff that not too long ago, we were all doing. Sure, it’s a scripted sitcom but some of the way they live in that show is how I remember living, a few close friends who I saw all of the time, who I invested all my energy into and who I would do anything for. Now I have a billion friends who I never see apart from through a screen, and there’s something not quite right about that.

If they were to make Friends now it would be a completely different show, and It’d probably be called “Acquaintances”. Joey would be a serial dick pic sender, Rachel addicted to selfies, Phoebe would be a “clicktivist” and Monica and Chandler would have never hooked up because Chandler would have discovered Tinder. Oh, and seeing Rachel having such an amazing time with other people through her Instagram feed, Ross would have felt completely undeserving of her love and would have killed himself. So, for now at least, I’m gonna live like “Friends”. Well, until Zuckerberg finds a fix that is.