Happy friendversary
Posted on
Regular users of social media will no doubt be aware of the many gimmicks employed to keep them coming back. Whether it's suggestions of things you might like, or fun, personalised content, it all amounts to the online equivalent of being told there are always sweets in the glovebox. The goal, of course, is to keep you engaged with the platform so its owners can sell advertising based on the size of its audience. The more you come back, the more valuable that ad space becomes, and the more opportunities you'll thus have to buy—for example—matching sets pyjamas for yourself and your dog. Each platform has its own methods of improving interaction. Some have specific areas of the software that show off a selection of content related to things you've been known to like in the past (like dogs), while others have shortcuts—hashtags or trends—that allow you to find topical content on a given subject (e.g. #pyjamas). Some, meanwhile, raise the stakes even higher: creating interactive content, designed to forge an emotional connection that will keep you coming back forever more. The trouble with aiming high, however, is that there's a lot further to fall.
On one of my rare visits to the platform today, Facebook showed me a 'happy friendversary' video it had made of me and a friend. For those less familiar with the concept, this is an automatically generated video that showcases a selection of images of a user and somebody they're connected with on the anniversary of the day they took their friendship to the next level and clicked 'add friend'. The photographs are generally framed against a themed backdrop, and accompanied by the type of music people start fights to in nightclubs. The idea is that, if you're so inclined, you'll share it to your own timeline so others can see how cheesy it is and be a little bit sick into their own mouths.
As a general rule, I avoid sharing things like this. It's not that I don't appreciate the sentiment. I do. It's just that I find it a little sterile when my news feed is already cluttered with so many of them, and at least one—through an unlucky combination of profile pictures—purports to be celebrating the union of someone in full Halloween make-up with a nervous-looking cat. Seeing half a dozen of the same video with slightly different grainy photographs crammed into them reduces the gesture, for me, to the equivalent of sharing a family-sized bag of Malteasers. As much as I treasure all of my friendships, if I were to celebrate them publicly, I'd sooner do so with something more personal than a video generated by the same algorithm that thinks matching human/dog pyjamas is something I'd like to see more of.
That being said, the video I saw today was so terrible that I just couldn't help myself...
Firstly, a little background. The person Facebook picked is someone I'd consider to be one of my closest friends. We met, through a mutual friend who was putting a new band together, in 2009. We'd actually been introduced, via the same friend, almost exactly six months earlier, but didn't become friends in our own right until we found ourselves in a rehearsal room together, wondering what noises to make. The next day, we made it official by connecting on Facebook. In the years that followed, we've shared countless experiences together, and been there for each other through all of the many highs and lows that life has been inclined to throw at us during that time. What this video would appear to highlight, however, is how little of that we decided to put on Facebook.
After telling us we've been friends for eight years, the video starts by summarising our entire friendship with four photos of the two of us together. As it turns out, all four of them were taken on the same night, a little over four months after we became 'Facebook friends', and are mostly identical but for the odd tilt of a head. Given my sometimes near eidetic capacity for recalling specific events, I know for a fact that three of them were taken within the space of about six minutes. (In my defence, I know this because of the guitar I'm playing in the pictures—given that they are of one of the aforementioned band's first gigs—as I'd only use it for certain songs during the set.) The video then goes on to tell us that we've 'liked' each other a lot—something that, while true, actually refers to the number of times we've clicked or tapped the 'like' option next to a post one of us has shared. In this case, that number is thirty-six... which, over the course of eight years, amounts to just slightly more than once every three months. It finishes by telling me that, "while there are billions of friendships... there's only one like yours". Again, while I don't disagree with the sentiment, it would mean a lot more if it wasn't accompanied by a picture of an entirely different friend, standing on her own, in a house at least one of us has never been to, whilst holding a poster.
Eight years of friendship, condensed into sixty-four seconds and documented in a series of photographs that actually account for less than twenty minutes of it. There are several reasons I tend not to visit Facebook as often as some of the other social media platforms. This is one of them.