For all, events, mini trends, and other phenomena often come to represent aspects or periods of your life. Italia 90, for one. Or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The funny thing about Facebook is that it feels a bit more than this. I know it’s just a tool to capture and share events, phenomena etc, but when I think about University nights out, I think of the Facebook photo upload and tagging marathon the day after. I’m sure you do too.
As the social glue, Facebook (or more importantly, the News Feed) feels synonymous with a broad range of defining life periods. And it’s getting broader.
The reason behind these musings is my noting, on a recent glance over my News Feed, a series of photos uploaded from the fifth annual ‘Tour De Lash’, an event which involves men, bikes and many pubs. I remember the photos appearing from the inaugural Tour, fresh faced enthusiasm personified.
Not much had changed, in truth. Old school friends with broader waste lines, departing hair lines, girlfriends and wives in tow. The evidence of a few more years on the jolly bender known as life.
I sometimes think that it’d be quite fun to capture periodic screen grabs of your News Feed from the first Facebook forays to today’s occasional glimpses. For those, like me, careering towards 30, I’m sure there would be a depressing familiarity about it all. First the manic photo uploading and tagging marathon of snake bite stained lips and Wednesday night debauchery followed by commentary chitter chatter of students poking, scarbulousing and graffiting around.
Then, without warning, the nights out photos stop (or are replaced by dinner and after work sneakys), the ‘miss you’s’ dry up and on the first glimpses of Summer our eyes are confronted with wedding dresses, confetti and first dances.
An occasional new born pops into view. Suddenly it’s albums worth of first smiles and congratulatory wall posts. In the blink of an eye your News Feed has shifted from a stream of debauched hedonistic filth to picnics and family day outs.
What next? First day at school? New house? Kids wedding? Grandchildren? And then what, death? A newsfeed of funeral photos and sympathetic clucking?
No doubt we won’t even remember what Facebook was as death bells begin to toll – considering the uptake of the site by parents, employers and old teachers, I wonder what legs it has now. But even so, there’s something about the Facebook News Feed which, quite subconciousely, as come to represent so many of those standard life changes that we all, and through every generation passes.
