I've noticed something interesting about my friends, or at least those right around the narrow thirty-one to thirty-three range that brackets my age - we don't seem very active on social media. This flies in the face of what I'm led to believe about our generation, a sorry, self-absorbed lot wasting all our time staring into our screens and praying for approval. So what's going on here?
I've been thinking about this and I think I'm onto something. I've noticed an interesting feature about us - we were all in the sweet spot when Facebook took off, and I recall all of us using it more or less in the same way. The logic back then seems really simple now - if you became friendly with someone, a Facebook request would be exchanged within a few days. I remember being very active on Facebook as high school ended, and using it to keep up with friends old and new throughout my freshman year of college. But for whatever reason we dropped off, and with few exceptions it seems that we've all stayed off.
My working theory is that Facebook left us jaded about social media. We tried it, and it either didn't really work or we didn't really need it, so we moved on. Part of it I attribute to something I'll call first-mover disadvantage: we discovered mostly bad features and decided we'd rather live without them than wait for improvement. We posted statuses before there was Twitter, we shared pictures before there was Instagram, and we scribbled on walls before there was Snapchat; each social media derivative seems linked to some tired Facebook feature. Looking back, I thought all those features were fine, but I was never interested in trying those separated platforms, either.
It's possible that my friends, being my selections to a certain degree, are likely to share some basic characteristics, with an aversion to social media being one possibility. But I've recently befriended some slightly younger people through work, and I notice two things about them - they are much more comfortable with social media and they hardly recall any 'good old days' of using Facebook. I'm almost jealous because it seems they've been spared whatever ruined my experience. It's like instead of getting all the channels in one cable package like I did, they just picked the ones they would watch and ended up having a far more favorable view of television. The reverse is true for a much older age group - they are perfectly happy with Facebook (and also seem content with the traditional cable TV package).
I acknowledge that suggesting Facebook was collectively 'scarring' might be a bit of an overstatement; I suppose I can just stick to saying it left us jaded about social media. Also, it's always dubious to apply such blanket statements over anything, particularly since I did very little research on this one; I just talked to a couple of my friends, who broadly agreed with me. But I feel something definitely happened, and in hindsight it seemed to happen in an instant; one day I was just done with Facebook. The best evidence I have is that my Facebook friend list cuts off with pretty much everyone I knew through the end of my freshman year. I know part of that is because I stopped sending requests to new people, but it takes two to tango; my new friends stopped sending requests to me, too. I remember one specific friend, a class year behind me, who used to joke that one of us would crack and send the request; by the time I graduated, I'd probably forgotten my login password.
But what about Facebook specifically made us so jaded? This is a tough one to figure out. My best guess is that we were all at that age, where for a few years we were seventeen going on twenty-three, and at that time having something like Facebook just wasn't a healthy idea. It's a really hard time because most kids are starting to figure themselves out, and having Facebook around to put every little fact on public display probably felt a little over the speed limit. On the surface, Facebook seemed a good way to look at photos, read status updates, and maybe do a little research for mutual connections; this meant most people lived in constant fear of others laughing at their worst pictures, mocking their lame comments, or scoffing at their short friend lists. They say social media puts your mistakes out there for everyone to see, but for me the problem was a constant sense of feeling mistaken. Over time most of us become OK with having ourselves out in the world, and all the simple facts that go along with who we are, but that's called growing up; for many of us, the first step was unfriending Facebook.
