I’ve recently become single and when I changed my Facebook relationship status I was a bit dumbfounded by the response.
I instantly had several people comment on it asking if I was okay, or a simple ‘awww’ and plenty of sad-faced smileys. I was perfectly fine. It was a mutual decision yet this made me feel like I should have been upset about the break-up.
I also noticed another thing – no one commented on my ex-boyfriend’s status apart from one mutual friend with a simple sad-face smiley and another friend of his give a non-committal comment.
I found that pretty odd.
Why should I need more comforting than a guy? Did my friends instantly assume I was the one who was dumped? It certainly didn’t happen that way. I know girls often talk more about feelings and I don’t doubt that he had his close friends around to ‘help’ him through it.
I hope I acted pretty responsibly by refusing to talk about it publicly on Facebook. Now to wait for the Facebook ads directed towards one more single person.
I got to thinking a bit more about this and realised that Facebook has ultimately changed the way we communicate. With my change of status as an example, only a few of my friends actually thought to text/ring me, instead putting their sympathies out for the world to see.
A lot of people talk about the negativity around Facebook and how it’s going downhill because of all it’s privacy issues (but that is a topic for another time) but the communication over Facebook can be awful. It can also be good, you may have some friends on the social media giant that you don’t see all the time so you catch up on Facebook and everything’s fine and dandy. But what about those friends who you never speak to?
This brings down communication skills. The addition of text-speak and acronyms such as Lol or dillygaf that circulate the internet don’t exactly give you much hope for the coming generations who are going to be getting onto these sites at younger and younger ages.
But social media does have a shelf life – just look at old sites like Bebo and MySpace. Once Facebook dies – what will be the next social media giant?
The MB Files 