I can’t believe that peer pressure would’ve been the only thing at the time. It can’t have been - there’s plenty of peer pressure, to do all sorts of things, in the corridors and house parties and spare moments of university. I successfully waved away every drug except one: the intoxicant checking of my profile, day after day, sometimes hour after hour, to see if I popped up on the cultural radar. To see if I mattered. On facebook, all life is measured and accounted for.

If you think about it, ‘profile’ really is the right word: a view of you sideways on, from afar. As much as you might try to talk to people, on facebook you shout into the space, as loudly or as often as you may, and hope that you’re overheard. Or seen standing next to the right people, or in the right places. It’s a really strange conundrum: you can’t truly sit with someone, explain “this is who I am, this is who I think you are, this is our relationship.” You can’t truly share an ‘experience’ with someone via the ‘book. It’s not a living space in that sense. You have to show, not say pin links and events to your person like Cub Scout badges and hope that accumulatively, the right impression is left. It’s an impressionist medium. 

Hold on. 

I went to check it again - on the very reasonable basis that it might have changed in the last seven minutes. And it has, I am proved right. A distant friend has said an insubstantial thing about an insubstantial thing I posted. How fortunate I am. If only I checked on my real friends this often. But just enough happens, just enough of the time, to give a semblance of life. And what’s more to give it a semblance of usefulness. The argument for “there’s nothing there” never can quite take root because in desperation, you can always find just one example of utility in the past week. There’ll be something ‘facebook has done for me’ that means I’d be foolish to give up on that medium. Inevitably, that thing is not to do with ‘true’ utility but a sense of social inclusion. Walk out of that party, and nobody’s going to tell you what happened. Nobody on that contacts list, painstakingly assembled over the years.

It helps us just enough to be useful. It represents a sculpture that we’ve all taken three years to build. It represents… how much time? It’s difficult, even nauseating to calculate how much. But to delete, to walk away would be admitting that it was time wasted. 

Facebook was funny, because it represented a perpetual now. Load it up and you were looking at a cross-section of life in the last 24 hours, at best. So when I started up timeline, I should have known exactly how unsettling it would be. There, on an impassive and unjudgemental screen, your life. Of course, I knew what I’d written in the book, but like a diary, one writes expecting that they’ll never be forced to read. I gleefully stored all that data on the promise that I’d never have it thrown back in my face. Compared, delineated and analysed. Cold and sterile, and in six days, public.

It could be that this isn’t facebook’s fault, it’s mine. Perhaps I am creating the wrong memories, prioritising and capturing the wrong things. But when I wrote them, it wasn’t a capture. It wasn’t stuffing special thoughts and observations into a secret box marked “open and display: 24th December, 2011”. It was like writing on a whiteboard. Writing on a wall. Graffiti culture stipulates that there is only one wall in a location, and it must therefore be everyone’s wall, available for writing and rewriting, covering over, editing, and loss. Apparently the syntax was misleading here.

It could also be that I am treating these memories the wrong way; revulsion, not wonder. It would be better to look at this unearthing of the past like an archaeologist and say “my, how this person must have lived! See, if we look here we can see the dubstep layer, and if we dig a little deeper we can see the proto-garage era that must have laid the foundations…”

…and look here, the broken shards of a romance. Lost traces of a friendship that should have been maintained. You could look at those fragments like a historian and say “whether pleasant or unpleasant, it’s up to us to analyse this evidence. To see what kind of mental state it indicated, and to learn from the mistakes of the past.” It’d be a brave man that did this. Could you turn your timeline over to a psychotherapist? It’s a fair argument to say that facebook has given us a tool we’ve never had in human history. Don’t hate the gun, just because you can’t wield it.

For me though, this is all too much. It’s all too much of an indicator that I might be pumping time into living a half-life, if the evidence of years is not true conversations had, moments shared, books read and written but is rather one long list of URLs and comments. That said, I am also realist enough to know that I will not break free, and that I don’t fully want to.

So starting today, I’m just going to chip away at the monolith. If I can turn facebook into something more real and more useful (perhaps closer to the way it was in the golden years), then I might not feel so unsure about my time there. If it could become a warm network again, of people I truly matter to and who matter to me, then some of this make sense. And so, every day, I am going to delete one person from my friends list. This shouldn’t be hard: there are at least 200 people on there that don’t need to be. They’re the equivalent of a decent but fleeting conversation at a party. Such things are allowed to end with conversation and the memory, they don’t have to have their life kept on a respirator, breathing but somehow not there. It would be a kindness to end them. 

And yet, as I click on the first likely candidate (don’t worry; it isn’t you), I am ready. But before I can click ‘unfriend’ (such an Orwellian term), I must - must - look at their profile. I must look at their wall, the things they’ve shared, their most transient hopes and dreams. Their current relationship - is that new? Wow, she’s done well. They’ve even…

…no, focus. Forget that this is a unique person. There are millions of unique people, I have already passed three hundred on the way to the shops this morning, and I was content not to engage with them. But soon, as wall is replaced by time, I will truly have to look at the entirety of someone’s life before I choose to reject it. To have an entire being loaded onto the fireship, before I click the button that sets light to it.

So long, Pippa. I hardly knew thee.

1. curiositydrivesadaptibility reblogged this from saladonions and added:

   Amazing expression...charlie brookers black mirror final episode. ‘The Entire History

2. saladonions posted this