My Struggle (with Facebook)

I have a complicated relationship with Facebook. It's not what you would call a love-hate relationship, because I don't love it - I feel worryingly dependant on it. I do, however, hate it. A lot of it is because of this feeling of dependancy - as well as many other reasons that I'm about to skim over. 

Before I go any further, I am fully aware of the irony of writing a blog about the downfalls of Facebook, which I am sharing on Facebook. But that's part of the problem - it makes you think you can't function in normal life it without it, as it's one of the few easy ways you can distribute your thoughts - which to be fair, is a positive in a lot of ways. Arguably more democratic. But still, it's democracy on Facebook's terms.

In the halcyon days, before Facebook - or 'b.f.' as I will call it from now on - social interactions that weren't face-to-face were conducted via text or email. If I could help it, I personally wouldn't answer a phone to speak to anyone. Partly because I come across like a moron on the phone, and partly because I feel someone ringing me is the height of rudeness - instead of a ringtone, the phone might as well be shouting "PAY ATTENTION TO MEEEEEEE". 

I have not, as yet, got over this aversion to phone calls, as my nearest and dearest will be all too aware. I like to think it adds a bit of mystery though, although no one else seems to agree with that assessment.  

But anyway - emails and texts were fine. Brief (unless I was feeling particularly self-indulgent, which I often am), personal and 'no pressure'. What I mean by 'no pressure' is that, although the person who has been emailing you for last month pleading with you to answer their original email may be putting you under pressure, you don't get notifications from Hotmail reminding you to email your friends if you haven't done so recently. Which is why Facebook irritates me - the feeling of guilt, that you're neglecting your friends; a few lines of computer code and automated notifications are making me feel bad as a person! That email you get if you haven't logged in for a while or suspended your account: John is missing you; Jane is missing you.

Are they though? 

Periodically, I flirt with the idea of leaving Facebook for good. Thoughts go through my head like 'could I cope?' How would I communicate with people if I left Facebook? And then I remember, I spent approximately 22 years of my life without Facebook. Although, to be fair, not entirely successfully from a social perspective! But I got by, you know. Perhaps it's also a matter of not entirely trusting that people would bother contacting me if I left - though that's more to do with my self-esteem than me underestimating people! 

I did suspend my account for a few weeks a while back - just to see if I could. A little bit like an alcoholic who may go without for a few weeks to prove they're not addicted. It worked ok, and as I wasn't idly checking Facebook on my phone every thirty seconds, I felt somehow freer. But then, I thought to myself, 'I'll reactivate my account and just check it every so often, now I've reigned myself in it will be fine - I'll only check it once a day'. Like that was ever going to work. Gradually, I checked it more often, then reinstalled the app on my phone - then I was back in with a vengeance. 

So close!

The interesting (/scary) thing about Facebook is the ability to to be kept in the loop of people's lives, without saying anything to them, or them directly saying anything to you. There are people I haven't contacted in years, but if they're sufficiently active, I can fill in the gaps over those years with a stream of status updates. Is that a good thing? Should you be peeking in on people's lives if you're not actually 'proper' friends? Perhaps not, but that's how things work now. 

Now, I'm not placing myself above anyone else - I'm still trapped. Maybe more than a lot of others. That's why I resent it! It's not just the fact I can snoop on my friends, it's also an ego thing - how many people like my status update? Has anyone commented on my photo? It's really made me annoyed with my neediness. And whatever happened to mystery?!

I'm not even going to go into details about the stupid, self-indulgent shallowness of it all - maybe some other time. 

I look ahead to the next 10-20 years, and I think to myself - how are our social interactions going to be more controlled and standardised? Facebook, ubiquitous though it is now, will be replaced with something all the more social, vibrant and whizzy in not too many years. A new paradigm will come, and Facebook will be on the scrapheap with MySpace, Friends Reunited and email. Part of me looks forward to that with glee; but most of me is terrified! 

But still, you don't see me leaving, do you...?

Creative Paralysis - A Self-Indulgent Rant

So I've been trying to think of ideas for a blog for at least two years. Well, it's not so much trying to think of ideas, I've got a list of quite a few; it's more that I've been stalled by the idea that anything that goes on in my mind might not actually be interesting to the average person, or indeed that it might give people more of an idea of who I am as a person than I'm entirely comfortable with. Also, I'm blessed/cursed by being friends with a number of wildly creative and vastly intelligent people, who seem to find no problem in expressing themselves, which intimidates me. But while that's still all in my head, it matters less.

Perhaps the most important factor in this is that I couldn't work out whether to go straight in with a meaty first post that would solve all of the world's problems, or just a test post that I wouldn't go out of my way to share with anyone. But if I did that, I'd never share it with anyone. So I'll just jump in with something in between.

As for a subject - it looks like it's becoming a metablog - a blog about blogging. While I don't see that continuing past this entry, writing this is putting me in mind of something else that's been bothering me for the past, well, seven years? Basically since I've left university.

At university, I had an inbuilt outlet for my thoughts. I was focusing my creative energies on the subject I was studying - English Literature - and that was enough. While some people (myself included) may question the ultimate practical use of a degree in such a subject, it served its purpose for me.

But since then, throughout everything that's happened in my life, good and bad, I've felt paralysed by an inability to find something to write about that felt right. Not too personal, but not too mediocre either. And deep within me, there's always been the feeling I need to create, at the same time as feeling that I have no talent for anything creative. While that is the case for music, painting, and just about any other art form, if I'm honest I do feel that I can string sentences together in a decent way.

Something else has been bothering me in the last few years (a lot of things bother me, as you will know by now - I'm controlled by my own neuroses, as many of us are). The idea that I'm out of practice - that I can't write anything any more, as I haven't bothered in years. As I've been writing this, I'm wondering whether my style is too formal, too serious, boring, and so on. I'm also paranoid that the last decade or so of alcohol abuse has shaved off a few IQ points, that I'm past my prime. That may well prove to be the case.

I need to relax. Just let words flow.

But at the same time, future blog posts will be more structured than this. In the past, I've felt my views have been too changeable, I just seemed to instantly adopt a view on something when asked, and argued the toss about it until I'm blue in the face. Now I'm in the closing months of my 20s, I am finally becoming more aware of who I am as a person, and in this way starting to get over my long-held, irrational belief that, somehow, I'm not really a proper person. Views are becoming more fixed - is this a good thing? Am I becoming more closed-minded as the years go on? Or am I just becoming more cohesive as an individual? I don't know, I guess that'll be another thing that becomes apparent in time.

I've got to stop this somewhere, it's becoming more and more self-indulgent. Although I suppose a blog can't really be anything else. Already starting to think about a proper subject that I can write about next - my turn-ons at the moment are mainly revolving around mysticism, cultural infantilisation and... fluffy kittens.

See you soon!

And I'd like to thank my wife Sarah for finally giving me the motivation to do this, albeit indirectly!