THE ANTI-SOCIAL NETWORK

more words from fellow MadeScapes contributor Trevor Smith:


February 15th 2012

It’s hardly news to announce that around 97% of my Facebook friends are not my friends.  A quick skim over the list reveals a collection (three hundred and fourteen of them) of former workmates, distant family members – some of whom I have never met – old college friends, a guy that sold me a pushbike three years ago, and one person whose friend request I accidentally accepted.  I addressed the accidental ‘friending’ via private message; her response was that her initial friend request was also an accident.  In a relationship it would make a great ‘first time we met’ story, but based on her status updates and her comments on other people’s status updates, we appear to be utterly incompatible, and now I am afraid to delete her because, despite my former assertions to the contrary, Facebook is the real world, and our mutual friends may swing to her favour, should I choose to proceed with the virtual cutting-off.

There are former classmates too, most of whom I have not laid eyes on since we were sixteen years old; more than half a lifetime ago now.  I have accepted just about every request I have received from old classmates.  Even if in our schooldays we were on little more than lunch-queue-nodding terms with one another, we share a common bond, as tenuous as having been alive at the same time; as solid as having heard the same rumours (from different sources of course) of whose turn it was for alcohol-induced late-night park-bench snoggings, or which teachers laid angry hands on troublesome pupils, and of course, why the media studies teacher, Miss Nubile (her  real name was even more suggestive), left in a blur of red lipstick and black leggings at the end of the spring term.

My primary motivation for adding ex-classmates has been to see what they are up to now – how many children they have, where they live, which classmates married each other, and whether time has been any more forgiving to their faces than it has to mine.  The adverse effect of this is that my childhood memories are now populated by a disturbing mix of children (those classmates that are not on Facebook) and group of child-sized, semi-pixelated, old-faced cynics, dressed in our old school uniform and carrying the rucksacks they carried in the early nineties.  These rucksacks no longer containing conkers, fingers of fudge, and a set of well-thumbed nudie playing cards, now bring forth all manner of post-digital treats, from cyber-bullying to porn on tap.  The tap of a finger on a moving screen, just like how we thought the future would be, when we got there.


TH Smith