What My Ill-Advised Return to Facebook Reminded Me About Online Communication
I left Facebook in a spitting haze of anger last year.
I vowed never to return. It’s a vow I’d have kept, had I not stupidly offered to manage my best friend’s Facebook page last month. She’d just bought a gorgeous little tea room in our hometown, realising a long-held dream in the process. The sale included ownership of the popular tearoom’s Facebook page, which had over five thousand followers.
“How am I going to decorate the place, plan my menu, do all that baking, AND stay active on Facebook… all on my own?” my friend lamented. Because she really is my best friend, I found myself saying I’d take over the page-management for her, at least until she opened.
So she sent me her login details, and that’s where the fun began. Or not. As I re-entered the familiar blue-accented whorl, my soul plummeted. There I was again, and nothing had changed.
If anything, it was worse. Re-entering Facebook felt like going back to an ex who made you feel a bit shitty but you weren’t sure why.
Then you finally wrenched yourself clear of them, and after a few months you got the benefit of seeing their behaviour from a distance. That was when you realised that most of the time they were rude and thick.
My friend’s feed was stuffed with near-identical posts to those populating my own Facebook feed before I left. Syrupy life-advice quotes (“just be kind”) mixed with petty community criticisms (“LOOK at all this rubbish, it’s an OUTRAGE!”) and the occasional whisper of niceness (an actual friend doing something fun or interesting).
This was all to be expected, though. What I didn’t expect was the staggeringly high number of low-quality interactions I’d have with the general public, many of whom are disturbingly lazy and thoughtless online.
For starters, I lost count of the amount of times I had to explain where my friend’s tea room is. Numerous, various iterations of “where is this?” “where are you?” and “where is it?” appeared below every new post, every day. Even though the full address is clearly listed on the page, and even though common sense would tell you that a page promoting a physical tea room would naturally include a fucking address.
And… none of them said “please”.
I’m about to sound like a cantankerous old biddy here — that’s because I am one — but why do so many people think it’s OK to bark instructions online? Why do so many people think it’s OK to bark one-line messages like “can I see the menu?” or “what time do you open” without even a cursory “hello” first? Not many of us would do that to someone’s actual face and expect a smile in return.
But because these are potential customers, you have to be nice. And because these weren’t potential customers but my best friend’s potential customers, I had to be nice like she is nice, which is a lot nicer than I am.
The effort was terribly, terribly exhausting, which told me a lot about myself: mostly, that I should never attempt to run my own tea room (which is fine, especially since I can’t cook).
But it also underlined the horrible ways in which people communicate online.
Job-interviewing is another soul-destroying experience made infinitely worse by social media. The likes of LinkedIn’s ‘Quick Apply’ feature means you can fire off a pre-saved CV in the literal blink of an eye; you don’t even need to read the ad first.
The ease of which you can apply for jobs means most companies will get hundreds of applications in the first few hours of a posting, which prompts them to tell you (and that’s if you’re lucky) that they will “only contact successful candidates.”
(Recruiter-ese is awful. Don’t you hate being referred to as a “candidate?” What’s wrong with “people”… or salary-wise, “per year” instead of “per annum”… because who in this century says “per annum” out loud?”)
This has led to a general acceptance of just not hearing back from companies you apply to. Even when they’ve asked for something specific as part of the application, like a cover letter, or a test, or a sawn-off finger.
Then there are birthday greetings and congratulations, which should be personal and genuine and heartfelt, but are now sent by complete strangers just because you’ve both got social media accounts.
You don’t have to remember the date, because the platform prompts you, or even write the actual message yourself, because a pop-up box appears with a pre-written “Happy birthday!” or “Congratulations!”
You click ‘Send’ and off it goes. No thinking required.
While you’d think it might be more genuine and less insulting not to send messages like these, they’re sent precisely because they’re so easy to send that not sending them could look a bit suspect. You might even leave the birthday person wondering what they did to upset you, even when they’re trawling through 286 other meaningless, identical “Happy birthday!”s from people they met once at a networking meeting, or during a mutual friend’s rainy barbecue.
You’re trying to be nice, but really you’re being just as rude as the people who bark “where is it?” on my best friend’s Facebook page.
It’ll be OK in the end, though. AI is here to save the whole world from bland, repetitive, thoughtless, lazy communicatio…
…oh, shit.
