The New Facebook

After yawning at yet another FB status update along the lines of: “Riding my bicycle this afternoon. Yay!” I couldn’t help logging off and spending a wheelbarrow-full of money.

Not on drink to ease the pain of not having my own bicycle. And not on an actual bicycle to ride myself and maybe exclaim my very own “Yay!” on my very own Facebook wall. In fact, forget the bicycle. It’s metaphorical and wildly random at best.

The money was spent on books, movies and music. And I was content to wait a few days to receive these items; unusual in this ‘instant gratification’ world we now live in.

You see, I’ve started to realise that Amazon might just be the new Facebook.

Even though ‘The Book’ might be “free and it always will be” as advertised after abject international online horror at the mere rumour that they were going to start charging, I don’t mind the spending or even the waiting.

As it were, the waiting is the part I love the most. A few days later, when you’ve forgotten all about your purchase of an old Batman comic you liked as a kid or Britney’s Greatest Hits, you hear a plop through the letterbox and instead of the usual bills and Avon catalogue there lies an exciting gift.

And if you’re like me in any way you’d have forgotten completely about it by now; it’s like Christmas all over again! Even though it may be the Madonna cd you bought for the wife or ‘Zulu Dawn’ for your mum-in-law, it’s still addressed to you so you get to rip the box open.

As long as you put some money every month into an inaccessible account, and draw some cash to spend on bus fare and fags, you can spend to your heart’s content.

And it’s not just entertainment one can purchase. They sell pots and pans and shoes and trousers. They even sell sporting equipment; so very soon I may just be exclaiming a “Yay!”

But I promise I’ll try really hard not to mention it on Facebook.

I'd love to Poke you, but I'm Married

Whenever I log on to Facebook it tells me I’ve been poked by someone, but I have no idea if it’s recent or if it was in 2008.

I’m always unsure what to do. I don’t want to poke them back – what if poking isn’t cool anymore? But I also don’t want to appear rude and ignore their virtual prod.

This is just one of the reasons we need an online manual of Facebook etiquette.

In such a manual we would learn that updating your status during a date is akin to rearranging your man-junk (what a friend likes to call a cabinet reshuffle) for all to see, even if it is to say ‘Nathan just told a funny joke’ (which, if I’m honest, would be breaking news… but even so).

This guide could also go a long way to stopping those cryptic ‘I’m so sad :(’ statuses followed by an ‘I don’t want to talk about it…’ when long-face-enquiries come forth – because, if you’re glum, no one wants to then reply ‘Well, why the fuck did you tell us then?’

There is nothing more despicable than the attention-seeking status update.

In some ways Facebook is a game –SimPersonality, if you like.

Remember when you first joined and felt a right loser coz you only had five friends. So you searched your friend’s friends list and if you vaguely recognised the person it was a like lovers reunited in a field of daisies.

Hell, even the postman would be there liking your liking of ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’.

A friend of mine created a personality by thinking of the most normal name he could and finding a picture online of an unremarkable face – he’s got loads of friends and he doesn’t exist.

I reckon an eighth of the profiles are just people’s pornstar names (that’s your first pet’s name plus your mother’s maiden name).

But in some respects it is more real than reality.

Just think of the last time you discovered that someone had unfriended you. It’s kind of the final word on that relationship, and brings new meaning to the dumper’s cliché, “We can still be friends”.

One of the first things I learnt in school was how to answer the phone politely; maybe my kids will learn that when becoming FB friends for the first time you should post a nice message on their wall enquiring about their wellbeing.

An Online Birth

A mate of mine’s kid had a Facebook page before he was born. His profile picture was the sonogram from his mum’s tum.

Reactions to this ranged from “ah, cute” to “fuck me, that’s weird”.

The kid’s status updates were along the lines of: ‘I am nine months away from being born’, and ‘I am kicking’.

Before the drive to the hospital mom just had to log on and punch in: ‘My head just punctured mommy’s amniotic bag’.

In between the screaming dad took time out on his Blackberry: ‘Long trip down the birth canal, but I’ve reached mommy’s vulva and can see the exit sign’.

These bizarre updates didn’t disturb me nearly as much as the fact that the parents felt it was okay to set their child’s ‘religious views’ to ‘Christian’, and add in some future favourite Bible quotes. It wasn’t the religious demographic I had misgivings with, but that the parents decided this for him.

And my concerns weren’t for the unborn son, but for mom and dad themselves.

So often teenagers resent their parents’ decisions that they have no control over but affect their lives – it just seemed like they were setting themselves up for future Slipknot t-shirt purchases and long, greasy hair hiding a perpetually sulky face.

And forget about embarrassing baby pictures being lugged out and shown to prospective girlfriends – the guy’s first potty session is right there, tagged and posted, for anyone with a modem to laugh at.

All the kid’s friends were obviously friends of his parents – a kind of virtual version of deciding who he should associate with – and I can only imagine the massive culling tantamount to online genocide that would one day come.

In the book ‘Blind Faith’ by Ben Elton, a future where we display every part of our lives on a social network, no matter how personal, is posited. In this reverse-Orwellian world, no thought or act is sacred; and videos of our first sexual experience and, yes, our actual birth are willingly posted.

Facebook is a place where we display not our true selves, but only the Self we wish to portray. We are our own press agents, building our image in the vain struggle to accumulate ‘likes’ and inspire comments with our attention-seeking updates.

Maybe our parents, who love us more than anyone else possibly could, are the best press agents we could imagine.

Popular on Facebook

In Real Life I probably have around six or seven friends. Maybe one or two of these guys I see on a regular basis, the rest maybe a few times a year, and it often seems like an Herculean feat to get all of us in the same bar for a boys’ night.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and Time magazine’s Person of the Year 2010, has over three million friends on the social network he co-created with some other guy whose name we can’t remember.

But if you believe the movie he had only one Real Life mate.

In the early stages of my Facebook existence I suffered from ‘friend envy’. Looking at the measly 20 in brackets, I spent hours trawling through other people’s friends lists, frantically searching for anyone I might’ve bumped into at a braai and said more than two words to.

Even guys from school I hadn’t seen in ten years – and didn’t like much then – cracked the virtual nod. And when they accepted, there was never much more than a “how u doing?” and that was it.

Oxford University professor of Evolutionary Anthropology, Robin Dunbar, from his study of social groupings throughout the ages – from cavemen around a fire to desk-jockeys around the water cooler – reckons that our neocortex (the bit of the brain that handles conscious thought and language) can only cope with 150 friends.

Sez he: “The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends [on Facebook], but when you actually look at traffic on sites you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world.”

That’s a stretch as far as I’m concerned, and an obscure blurring of the definitions of ‘friend’ and ‘associate’.

So who should we request to be our mate on FB? Those we see on a regular basis? A bit pointless when you think about it. The most you should type would be: Let’s get out of the house/office and meet for a beer.

Or maybe it’s people we like that have flown across the sea for a better life in greener-grass country? Makes sense; easier than a postcard and more fun than email. Nice in theory, but not like we’re going to check up and message them every day.

And only a couple of status updates and pics to peruse – boring!

But there are those who swear blind they are so popular they’ve got two thousand close confidantes – those hippies and addicts munching mushrooms at trance parties – and they care about every one of them.

Jimmy Kimmel, host of Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC, has a good way of separating true friends from people who’re just using you to boost their stats: "Let's say on Friday, post a status update that says, 'I'm moving this weekend and I need help.' The people who respond, those are your friends. Everyone else isn't."

I don’t think I’m brave enough for that.