Without the option of absentmindedly writing ‘happy birthday m8’ on a wall to casually acknowledge the tenth birthday of The Facebook, we figured we would casually acknowledge a few of the ways in which the invent of The social network has changed the way we operate as humans.
It has certainly come a long way since its horny co-ed days and to its 1.23 billions users all over the world is a source of endless enjoyment, frustration, obsession or complete loathing. Zuckerberg, you son of a bitch, this may just have been crazy enough to work.
LIKE
Facebook has come in, taken ‘like’, put that thing down, flipped it and reversed it. As a word ‘like’ was already a bro, it was super versatile and could be used as a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, preposition, particle, conjunction, hedge, filler, and quotative. It has since been Zuckerberg-jacked and has become a kind of $ocial ¢urrency in this brave new online world, so much so that you can actually buy ‘Likes’, with actual real world money. The ‘Like Button’ is now deemed more important than THE DEFINITION of the word:
ON THE SAME PAGE
Like a guillotine of definitive approval, the ubiquitous ‘Like’ button has fallen 3.4 trillion times since its inception in February 2009 on some 54 million pages, like the one that undoubtedly lead you here in the first place.
Prior to the human milestone that was The Like was the introduction of Pages in 2007, elevating the construction of one’s online persona from the two-dimensional blingee playlist engineering pioneered by MySpace and its predecessors to a next level personal branding exercise wherein users pledged their allegiance to public groups through a declaration of Likemindedness – a way of saying ‘(Y) we’re on the same Page,’ if you will.
Public Groups, and later Pages, became another – if not the most prominent way – for users to align themselves with everything from a popular sentiment (‘The Cold Side Of The Pillow!’) to a popular artist (the take no prisoners, give no phucks Rihanna has at the time of writing 85,037,395 Likes) and if you don’t include inane status updates better suited to Twitter and the general ennui of your Timeline, Pages are the sole purview of Facebook today.
Thank
Goodness
CLICKTIVISM
Somewhere along the line Facebook has come a soapbox shaped platform on which users could stand to Open-Letter with their #KONY2012 out.
EVENTS
Do you need a housemate? Have you lost your phone? Are you selling a bunch of junk? Are you moving overseas and rly want to see everyone before you go? Are you and your band performing at some community hall contest and need warm human bodies to fill the room/raise the roof? Have you got an upcoming event with a kooky name?
Facebook.
R.I.P
ALL NEWS IS GOOD NEWS
Pages have also drastically changed the way we consume #news. Since the introduction of Timeline in 2011 [and depending on however many Pages you Like and frenemies you hide from your feed], Facebook has come to resemble something closer to a traditional RSS feed of relevant news stories than your average text reader.
Separating the wheat from Twitter’s chaff and capitalising on the knowledge that they’ve played a huge part in how news is both broken and consumed, Facebook have introduced both a Trending sidebar and yesterday launched a new standalone app called Paper that filters your newsfeed into a flip book timeline manned by a team of content specialists who, according to Gizmodo, “pick out content that it thinks you’ll be interested in.”
Your life curated by a team of strangers who know absolutely nothing and everything about determined by the pages you identify with and the stories with which you engage most? It’s at once absolutely terrifying and, well, terrifyingly awesome.
Image has now been shared in newsfeeds 1.23 billion times.
MAJOR LIFE EVENT
Life events have never seemed more trivial! Nor have they ever been so widely communicated. It has changed the way in which people ‘birthday’ – like, purrrretty sure in like the olden days people would just send retro physically manifested birthday cards to people when they checked their IRL calendars and found that a person they knew had a birthday coming up. That shit takes ten seconds now.
Life events have never seemed more trivial! Nor have they ever been so widely communicated. It has changed the way in which people ‘birthday’ – like, purrrretty sure in like the olden days people would just send retro physically manifested birthday cards to people when they checked their IRL calendars and found that a person they knew had a birthday coming up. That shit takes ten seconds now.
Likewise, whenever someone in your wider ‘friends’ circle, who you may have met once at a thing and then not wanted to offend them by not accepting their overzealous request, is graduating/engaged/poppin’ babies you are going to be one of the thousand or so people to first hear about it #blessed. It’s a weird thing, when you think about it, to be blossoming into adulthood in a time when major ‘Life Events’ have been reduced to:
So yeah,
~HAPPY BIRTHDAY~
