Facebook funny stuff

Another lengthy pause since my last entry… but I’m not going to go on about that again, just accept that my blogging happens when it happens.

Instead, I will resume my ranting about Facebook. A friend of mine has brought to my attention a very interesting article by Thomas Jones in the London Review of Books[1], about the recently-revealed scandal that Facebook deliberately tried to control people’s feelings - ‘to make users miserable’, as headlines have claimed - as part of a mass psychological experiment, by manipulating the quantity of either positive or negative content in their newsfeeds. This issue opens up a whole new can of worms concerning social networking phenomena which goes far beyond the scope of my previous Facebook-themed griping (see Facebook Face-off and Status Update): the only reason I mention it here is because I find that Mr Jones rants about Facebook so much more eloquently than me. He opens thus:

Heaven knows there are reasons enough for anyone to feel miserable about Facebook: the mediation and commodification of ordinary human relationships, the mediation and commodification of every aspect of everyday life, the invasions of privacy, the ‘targeted’ adverts, the crappy photos, the asinine jokes, the pressure to like and be liked, the bullying, the sexism, the racism, the ersatz activism, the ersatz everything.

This sums the phenomenon up pretty well, in my opinion, and all of the issues he lists could perhaps become the subject of future blog entries. However, as I have also previously mentioned, much as I really want to detest it for so many reasons, not all my experience with Facebook is negative. Despite its compulsive, addictive properties, and the fact that it is mostly crammed full of utter rubbish, there are some aspects of Facebook that I cannot deny I have come to value. It has provided the means to communicate, albeit in a “mediated” and “commodified” way, with past acquaintances that I surely would have otherwise lost entirely from my life. I also appreciate the opportunity to – very occasionally, I hope – vent my frustrations concerning my personal or professional life, and to receive sympathy and well-intentioned advice that can sometimes even be useful. Most of all, I think, I appreciate Facebook as a means for diffusion of humour. I really like to laugh, and whilst I am not amused by all posts of supposedly comical intention, I have to say that Facebook has supplied me with countless cartoons, anecdotes and images that I have found delightfully witty, comical and mood-lightening. Furthermore, the nature of Facebook makes it so much easier to share and propagate such things (and cannot really be more annoying than the mass emails that were required to do so previously).

As I tried to express in Status Update, Facebook makes wannabe comedians of us all, as we strive to artfully combine wit and brevity in our status updates. There are regular stories in the press about how innocent Facebook posts or Twitter tweets have ‘gone viral’, being re-posted and re-tweeted far beyond the original intended audience of author Joe/Josephine Public, providing their 15 minutes of fame (or notoriety) and maybe even changing their lives forever (for example, this Business Insider article about the now famous “Hi Becky… spin the bottle…now wants to play Farmville” joke by ‘regular guy’ Chris Scott makes some interesting points about plagiarism, intellectual (or humouristic) property rights and the free-for-all “borrowing” of text that has become an internet norm).

Within my own, limited online social network (firmly set to “private, friends only”, for what it’s worth)  I would like to think that, if I broadcast elements of my personal life on Facebook, it is done mostly in the aim of delighting, amusing or otherwise speaking meaningfully to my tailor-made mini-audience. For examples, recent personal status updates have included:

My son is currently air-guitaring and singing his little heart out to "The Final Countdown". He doesn't know the words, but this does not deter him.

My son singing one of his improvised songs, in full voice as usual, comes out with....'move you arrr........ms....' Had us worried there for a mo... and he couldn't work out why we couldn't stop laughing.

Although my daughter can't speak yet, I know which of my children I can understand more easily at the moment. She cries when she's hungry, tired or has tummy ache. My son has just had a meltdown because I can't immediately produce a life-sized tractor for him to play with.

My son just walked into the kitchen asking "excuse me Madam, is this the restaurant?" Playing along, I said "yes sir, would you like a table for two adults and a child?" "No silly, for 3 adults and a wizard." As you do.

My son asks to sit on Daddy's motorbike, then asks 'where do we put the coin?'

[What this brief exercise has shown me, rather worryingly, is a) how my life revolves rather a lot around my children, and b) that they are really not going to be impressed should they ever somehow be able to read my back-dated Facebook profile in years to come.]

I guess I know my audience. I imagine these anecdotes will speak to those who know my children (some of my Facebook “friends” are family members, or parents of children in my son’s class at school), and to those whose links with me are more distant in time and geography, but are of my generation and so have children of similar age. For others, maybe they find such anecdotes funny, maybe not: that is up to them. If they get to bored or annoyed with my recurring parenthood references they can always block my posts or ‘un-friend’ (de-friend?) me.

Extending the comic intention further, there are those that attempt create a running theme in their status updates, like a kind of micro-mini-series – working on the assumption, I suppose, that their readers are paying enough attention to keep up with the thread and therefore appreciate the ongoing joke. One of my Facebook friends is a particular genius in this regard: he has recently been posting regular statuses that superbly parody the current trend for irritating “Which Disney/Harry Potter/Game of Thrones/Lord of the Rings etc. character are you?”-type quizzes. These are churned out in their hundreds by sites such as BuzzFeed.com and PlayBuzz.com, it seems, serving up trite quasi-character analysis (in the name of entertainment – I hope for all our sakes that no one is media-muddled enough to take them seriously) via sets of inane multiple choice questions, the “results” of which then choke our newsfeeds. I read somewhere that apparently we should really not be clicking these links, and certainly not sharing them, as they are part of yet more data-harvesting crookery (although I did succumb to the “What Country in the World Best Fits YourPersonality?” quiz and was astounded that it came up with the country I actually live in, and not my country of birth, despite the fact that for the first question I definitely answered ‘tea’ and not ‘a glass of wine’ or ‘whiskey’).

My friend’s series of “quiz” parodies are (like many of his other posts) skilful, amusing and sometimes admirably anti-establishment (usually an effective humoristic device as far as I am concerned). I have his permission to quote a few:

XXXX XXXXXXX just took the quiz "Which Famous Actress Are You" and got: "Childhood Shirley Temple singing "On the Good Ship Lollipop"!

XXXX XXXXXXX took the quiz "Which Bible Character Are You" and got: "Fish and Loaves."

XXXX XXXXXX  just took the quiz "Which Component of America's Failing Infrastructure Are You" and got "Moral/Ethical Fiber."

XXX XXXXXXX just took the quiz" "Which of Sagrada Familia's Spires Are You" and got "The ones that aren't finished yet."

XXXX XXXXXXX just took the quiz "Which Albert Ayler Song Are You" and got "Witches and Devils."

XXXX XXXXXXX just took the quiz "Which Tell-Tale Stain on Monica Lewinski's Blue Dress Are You" and got "Mayonaise."

Now these, for me, exemplify effective Facebook status update humour. If more people managed to recognise Facebook for what it is, and succeeded in turning the tool against itself, I think the future of our mass-media-mangled society would be just a little less bleak.

[1] Thomas Jones (2014), “Short Cuts”, London Review of Books, 17 July, p 6.