I have carried out another ruthless and bloody cull of my social media pages. I do this every often when I look at my list of ‘friends’, particularly on Facebook, and it occurs to me that I have not seen some of them in decades and in some instances for most of my life. My ‘friends’ – and let’s be honest, many are not really friends in the actual definition of the word friend – used to include people I had never even met, occasionally people I had never heard of. That was just plain silly and I’ve mostly put that right.
Then again, if you accept from the outset that social media is a make believe world and social media friends are largely not real friends, that’s fair enough if that’s how you want to organise your social media. What works for me might not work for you, or vice versa, and we are, just about free to choose our way of life on social media and in real life.
I wince when Facebook memories come up on my timeline. I appeared to be a shameless show-off, boasting about my overseas and UK holidays and sharing endless photos of what a great time I am having in every moment of my life. But then, that’s what social media in general and Facebook in particular appears to be. No way can you go on there and share the broken toilet in your hotel room, or the cockroach in the bathroom. Everything is always “great” and “brilliant” – other superlatives are available – and rarely average or crap. At least my self-loathing has persuaded me, not that I needed any persuasion, that selfies are not for me. For people who love what they see in the mirror and feel the need to share what they see with the rest of the world, well it’s your shout!
Facebook, I always say, is the equivalent of taking a photograph album (one of the teenagers, there) down to to your local pub and showing all the photos to people you barely know or in many instances don’t know and have never met. If you were in the pub and someone did that, you’d think they were mad. As someone who could reasonably and fairly be called mad, I think that’s fair comment, but then I would, wouldn’t I?
So, I’ve removed the social media axe from the wall and taken it to people I haven’t seen in many decades, am unlikely to ever see again and – shall I be brutally honest here, at the risk of losing my few remaining readers? – people I would frankly not want to see again. (With regard to the latter, there was only one, someone for whom I once had high regard, but has since disappeared down the conspiracy rabbit hole and now posts anti-vax, pro Trump, antisemitic nonsense and, frankly, filth. I don’t need fascism in my life, thank you very much.)
In truth, the “ruthless and bloody” Facebook cull was nothing of the kind, just the removal of people I don’t really know any more. I’ll probably regret it, losing out on sales of my next book and views of this blog, but sod it. What’s real and make believe matters more to me than perhaps it should. If you can still see me on social media, you’re still my friend. Bad luck.
