This month I had planned to write an ode to London. I’ve had the idea for years now but somehow I never seem to get round to finishing, or for that matter starting it. It was to be, I hoped, an intricate piece, praising the city in which I live in and am more than just a little fond of. However, my enthusiasm for this article was temporarily stymied by my journey home this Thursday which got me thinking about less romantic, creative ventures and instead about vanity. Therefore, once more I turn my attention away from artistic writing and as is common for this blog, ranty extrospection.
What could have possibly sparked such a U-turn? It was my old nemesis the bus. The place where all genders, ages and demographics meet for a slow, smelly, cramped journey, united only in their misery at being on board. Well at least that’s what it felt like at ten past six on said Thursday. However, it wasn’t all bad. A lady in front of me had kindly decided to share a Starsailor song at full volume with the whole lower deck. Whether we wanted her to or not seemed irrelevant, she simply removed her headphones from her iPhone and played the song through her handset. What joy, what a charming considerate young lady. But, believe it or not, it wasn’t this blatant act of disregard for anyone else on the bus that started my thought process. After all, I do live in London, and despite my love for it, this type of behaviour is all too common place. No it was not this but instead the visuals on her iPhone that kicked my brain into rant mode. As I identified the source of the noise and looked over disapprovingly, I also watched her scroll through her facebook contents. As she moved her fingers over the touch screen front, swiping through seemingly endless status updates, profile pictures, “news articles”, and fag pack philosophies photoshopped onto sad or ‘inspiring pictures’ my heart sank. Why did my heart sink? What was she browsing that coaxed such a reaction? I expect at this point some people would be expecting an anti-Facebook rant. I would say, if I were to guess myself, that that wouldn’t be a bad shout. After all I’ve not always been a fan of social media but I must confess to having an account. In fact I have an account that I use. In fact, in fact, I use it far more frequently than I feel comfortable with or would admit unprompted (in person). So no, facebook is not to blame for my general disgruntlement. What was then? It was the content and more specifically what the content represented.
The online profile that this woman was looking was not unusual. Although I couldn’t see it perfectly, it reminded me of around eighty percent of my friends home pages, including my own. It was a mishmash of various collections of intended originality. It was meant to be defining, witty, colourful. The best snippets of life thrown together for the benefit of onlookers. The objective being to present their best face to the world. Social Media has allowed us to invent ourselves in a way that has never been possible before. We can sensor and harness the good, the best parts of who we are, and the most spectacular aspects of our lives and shamelessly palm them off as reality. This is not Facebook’s fault, this is not a weakness of technology. No, this is a very human characteristic. It’s vanity at it’s best. And as I looked around the bus, on this gray and rainy Thursday, there was barely a person who was not in some way ‘communicating’ with the world through their phones. It actually scared me. So what did I do? I logged into Facebook.
I did so however with a racing analytical mind. Or as close to a racing analytical mind as I can. I browsed through the pages and posts of friends, colleagues and family. What I was searching for specifically were examples of where social media was being used to advertise it’s users. I didn’t need to search too hard; they were right in front of me from the very first second.
Let’s start with the pictures. This is an easy one really. It’s not hard to see how pictures can be manipulated to look brilliant, or more importantly, to make its subject look brilliant. Good light, nice angles, and endless, endless pouting and smiling. Scrolling through a users profile pictures is the metaphorical equivalent of boarding the ego express, on your way to ego-central, destination egotistical city. What makes me laugh is that, what with the endless barrage of photographs, they no longer really make me stop and look at them. All those beach snaps, or ‘rocking parties’ with people having unfathomable amounts of fun whilst doing something, wacky for the camera, no longer really rouse me. For example when’s the last time you looked at someone in Paris pretending to hold up the Eiffel tower and thought “Wow, that’s a great picture - how original”? However, boastful pictures do appear to be pretty acceptable now under the veil of “sharing”. I do it myself, but let’s not play dumb, it’s vain. We’re not sharing a picture because others enjoy seeing it. We share it because we enjoy other people seeing it. If you disagree, ask yourself whens the last time you posted a picture of yourself looking terrible?
Next I started to look at peoples statuses. To re-iterate this is not an anti Facebook rant! This was merely the medium which bore the brunt of my thought process. I also had access to it from the confines of the lower deck of the number 12 bus. Status updates tend to fall into one of three categories - self serving, attention craving, and finally, enlightened snippets or educational. Only the last is positive, and even that can often border on preachy. I fall victim of the self serving one quite frequently. In fact I seldom update my own status unless I want something, whether it’s for people to read something I’ve written or recommend a plumber. Either way there’s not a lot in it for other people. Next there’s the attention seekers, normally with updates like, “People are such bellends sometimes!” or more simply “I’ve had such a bad day”. The object being to provoke a response. Self serving in it’s own way, and asking to be indulged. Lastly we have the educators (as I wrote this I thought of the word regulators and feel that I may now be doomed to have Warren G stuck in my head for the remainder of the evening) . These are the enlightened few, or not so few as it would seem, who just can’t stop themselves telling the rest of us what we do wrong. If this is not vanity at its worst I don’t know what is. The irony of the two sentences put together have not escaped me, particularly as I will post this on Facebook at some stage.
Finally there’s wall posts and sharing of content. Sharing can take many forms, but there’s one type of post I really wanted to highlight. The post that apparently shares intellectual content. The use of the word ‘apparent’ is deliberate by the way. This is the content that really grinds me down. This is where people really show their true colours and alas their vanity. Let me start by saying that each of us have different opinions. Those opinions are equally entitled to be voiced. Furthermore, a social media platform is definitely a good place to distribute those opinions, in fact to some degree it’s designed for it. However, one thing worth remember is that - just because it’s on the internet doesn’t make it true. If I were to start a blog and call it the ‘Real World News’ , that wouldn’t mean that the content published on that blog would have even an element of truth to it. The internet has made it immensely easy for us to find content and so called facts at such high speeds. However,what's concerning is that truth, and accuracy seem to have taken a back seat for the sake of that speed. Where am I going with this? I’m shining the torch on the very understood, but often ignored when it suits you, concept that information on the web is very easily manipulated. ‘Facts’ are so easy to come by that anybody can share anything without context, without references, or without proof, just to support their own agenda. How can I look like I care about politics? How can I show I care about the right kind of politics? How can I show off my knowledge about sport? How can I show my artistic side? Just use Google that’s how! Just type a few sensible key words and hurrah you can probably find just about any facts you need! What’s more worrying is that a misleading status, or post can potentially reach hundreds, or even thousands, of people and those so called facts will be interpreted as gospel. The upshot is, regardless of your opinion you can make whatever you want look well researched, well supported and insightful. Better still the people who read your comments will think whatever it is you want them to, because you’ve not so subtly ushered them towards a ‘fact based conclusion’. Queue smugness. Vanity wins once again.
So how is this not about social media you’re probably still asking. After all I’ve spent the last one thousand or so words pulling apart the ways in which social media delivers content which is effectively just vain. But that wasn’t my point. Social media as I’ve stated before is not vain, but people are vain. Our vanity has been around for as long as we have. It’s just that now we have a way of imposing our vanity on others, a way of reaching around the globe and showing people how brilliant and amazing we are. What’s better is we can mutually indulge each other in the form of ‘likes’ and smiley faces. Don’t get me wrong I include myself in almost all the categories above. In fact the first thing I’ll do once I finish this article is to send it to my makeshift editor and ask for feedback, hoping, above all things, that the response will be positive. Why, because praise matters to me. The way I look to them matters to me. That is vain!
Maybe I’ve done us all a big disservice. However, as I sat on that bus listening to Starsailor, I certainly didn’t think so. Once upon a time modesty was virtue. Now it would seem be almost an impossibility.
