Farcebook

I will never understand why people apologise for not posting on their Facebook or Instagram pages for a few days or weeks. It’s a photo of your dog giving up carbs, or your breakfast or an opinion on your dog having breakfast without carbs, and God knows the world doesn’t need any more opinions. If Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Insta, MyTwitFace, Snapchat, LookAtMe, SelfiesRus whatever all closed down tonight nothing would actually happen. No one’s life would change if a minor young celebrity missed a few days posting on YouTube and actually went out into the real world and achieved contact with their fellow humans and didn’t document every fart. If Tumblr folded tomorrow that may push a lot of awful angst-filled young poets slash artists slash waiters offline but I can live with that.

Facebook as a platform has become like an old high school friend who keeps sending you invitations to pyramid selling parties disguised as fun-filled reunions. You kind of want to stay in touch but then you remember that the drama and the detail and the requests to buy from their brother’s online vitamin business have become so annoying that you wonder why you bother. I check my news feed and think, yes I’m guilty as charged, I’ve bored people to tears with descriptions of my eating habits, or family or 500 too many photos of a holiday, but some days I can’t face reading about someone I last saw in person four years ago doing the same. In the political sphere, Farcebook has become a redneck wonderland and I just don’t have the energy to deal with it.

Yes, I love the witty people, and the connection with dear ones who live overseas and the camaraderie of groups of people with whom you share a passion or career, but for the love of the goddesses, can we filter out the passive-aggressive questions aimed at god-knows-who, the ill-thought-out spelling of your/youre/Ur, the I’ve lost six kilos today, conspiracy theories and the humble bragging?

We need editing filters on all our social media accounts that say, This post is dull or derived from an uninformed and uneducated view of the world, are you really sure you want to post this? This post will be muted for the good of humanity.

Ah, the irony. Of course, I’ve linked this whinge of a blog post to publish on Facebook and Twitter. Hope to see you living in the real world one year soon.