Motherhood Facebooking...or Facebook mothering

I’ve got so many terribly important things I should be doing right now it’s completely unreal, so instead I’ve decided to whip up another blog entry. Returning yet again to my Facebook ranting, I going to take the easy way out by sharing my own recent attempt at a “micro-mini-series” of quasi-comical status updates, just to illustrate how it seems to me that Facebook comes to shape experience and not just report it. As I’ve said countless times, I don’t intend this blog to be about motherhood, but as motherhood ends up being the subject of a large proportion of my Facebook status updates, needs must…

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no.1: building a meccano motorbike whilst breast-feeding.

This was a genuine occurrence, and the one that set the whole series off. The question is, how many of the examples that follow were shaped by the fact I was now looking for humourous combinations of activities to report on Facebook?

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 2: cooking dinner whilst playing tennis - thankfully with an imaginary ball...

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 3: doing the household accounts whilst simultaneously entertaining a baby with a rattle and "wind the bobbin".

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 4: winding baby mid-feed whilst dealing with a felt-tip-pen-on-sofa-cushion crisis.

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 5: putting clothes away whilst helping my son and his imaginary friends fight an imaginary wolf and throw it down the stairs. Then rescuing said wolf because it is in fact a nice wolf.

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 6: talking to phone technical help/the electricity board/my boss etc. on the phone while pretending to the baby in the bouncy chair that she is getting full attention.

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 7: manoeuvring around trying to set up computer and internet connection without waking the sleeping baby in arms. Above all take care not to let the dummy fall...

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 8: making work phone-calls from the day-care centre car park with baby sleeping in the car. Because when you said you'd be in the office the week maternity leave ended you forgot it was also the school holidays.

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no.9: discovering work bag doesn't fit in pushchair. Well, it does, but not with the baby...

This last one was not even true. I could in fact fit the bag in, as long as I put it in first and placed the clip-on car seat afterwards.

What is striking to me, now I have compiled this list, is that none of these reports (with the possible exception of the first one) seem half as funny as they seemed to seem to me at the time. Which should really be a lesson to me. I guess real humour, like real literary art, stands the test of time because it has been carefully constructed: planned and drafted and re-read and edited and sculpted and perfected. The problem with the internet is that it makes it just too easy to put out any old tripe far too quickly. In my last entry I talked about the useful and necessary process of re-reading and editing made obligatory by the practice of blogging. Maybe it would be useful if the same applied to status updates and the like. If it were more necessary to take time, to “think before you tweet” for example, then a fair few of recent history’s media-mashup conflicts could have been avoided, and the internet would be not quite so chock-full of such utter rubbish. And like the paradox that ended my Blogging versus Motherhood entry, by writing about the problem I am adding to it.

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. 

 

Status Update

My rant about social networking became rather long, so I decided to leave until another blog entry my reflections upon one of Facebook’s main elements: the “status update”. This is the principal means by which a member “communicates” (for want of a better word) with others; users can respond to Facebook’s caring question“what’s on your mind?”, attach and comment an image, video or link, or just type whatever the hell they like, and these ‘updates’ are diffused to “friends” and followers in the Facebook world.

I seem to remember that Facebook status updates used to be restricted in length - a little like mobile phone text messages - to 160 characters, although this no longer appears to be the case (just as ‘unlimited text’ phone subscriptions and multiple-message Smartphone functions have made the SMS character limit obsolete). This restriction required people to exercise their verbal faculties a little, to condense their comments, anecdotes, jokes and observations into one sentence or so. But I think the role these statuses (stati?) play has gone beyond this; thoughts and experiences are no longer reported on Facebook, but evaluated, maybe even shaped by their suitability for a Facebook post.  My Other Half is even more wary and cynical about online media than me, and although finally persuaded (by me) to join Facebook, would probably like to think that he uses it ‘ironically’: however, even he regularly declares something funny enough ‘to go on Facebook’, and has been known to log on straight away to make it so.

While I'm on the subject of social networking and mini-messages, I might as well make it known that I simply don’t get Twitter, the so-called ‘micro-blogging network’. I mean, isn’t it just the equivalent of a list of Facebook status updates, without the other “applications”? And what on earth is a hashtag anyway? Twitter was just getting big around the time I finally joined Facebook: I did even sign up once, but I simply didn’t see the point and stopped checking my account. Rather ironically, I do still sometimes receive emails telling me about what is being “tweeted”.

Of course, the comfort in brevity, of immediate transferral of messages in short sound-bites that do not tax the concentration, is not entirely new to this social networking age; I’m thinking of newspaper headlines, or the popularity of inspirational/motivational quotations. So much easier than having to read a whole book in order to find improvement, enlightenment or solace! The difference is that headlines no longer head anything and quotations are no longer extracted; the mini-message is the sum total, and has become the norm of communication, both private and public.

 Many years ago I was lucky enough to discover the work of writer and artist, Ashleigh Brilliant, probably most famous for his vast series of ‘Pot-shots’ or ‘Brilliant Thoughts in 17 words or less’. He has made a career – and an art - of creating and illustrating humorous, philosophical and often beautifully sarcastic epigrams, following a strict set of self-imposed rules. Amongst my favourite examples that I recall are:

“A world at peace is worth not fighting for.”

“I have abandoned my search for truth, and am now looking for a good fantasy.”

“Please don't tell me to relax - it's only my tension that's holding me together.” (this one describes me very well)

 “Life is the only game in which the object of the game is to learn the rules.”

“I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.”

[All the above quotations obviously © Ashleigh Brilliant. I rather doubt this unpaid, unread blog post will have the power to lead any as-yet uninitiated to his work,  but just in case you are reading this, let me say that you’d do much better spending your time checking out his website www.ashleighbrilliant.com. ]

My sister and I discovered some of his ‘Pot-shot’ postcards in a gift shop, bought a pile and then ordered a catalogue by post (those were the days). We would spend hours pouring over it, showing it to friends and choosing which ones to buy to decorate our bedroom walls. Years later I was moved to look him up again, and am now on his mailing list and own a CD-ROM version of the complete illustrated catalogue of 10,000 Pot-shots, which I have been known to use for teaching purposes (it has a very handy search function).

As tweets and Facebook posts became ever more dominant, I was often moved to wonder what the great man must feel, now that it seems that so many people are constantly trying to be word-limited poets, micro-philosophers and punch line comedians. Does it denigrate his art, bring it to new prominence, or mean nothing at all? I contemplated asking him, and even started writing him an email – I found it years later in my Outlook drafts folder – but never ultimately found the time or courage to phrase the question before the passage of time made it seem obsolete.

Maybe the Facebook/Twitter phenomenon is a good thing. Maybe it pushes people to try to make their public statements that much more humorous, more thought-provoking, more broadly relevant and appealing. But I somehow doubt it. Instead, lives are being shaped and deformed by the tyranny of social networking – experienced in bite-sized, digitized fragments, as a mere mirror of an online profile.

Facebook face-off

Like my approach electronic gadgets (discussed in Technology in my Pocket), my relationship with so-called ‘social networking media’ such as Facebook is riddled with contradictions. Facebook in particular scares me with its unhealthy power and ubiquity. It requires and promotes the use of yet more planet-guzzling electronic equipment, as well as augmenting that invisible cloud of wi-fi waves, mobile phone radiation and GPS signals which constantly bombards our fragile cells.  I don’t know whether to consider it symptomatic or emblematic of all that is wrong with our current society, but I think it is dangerous and damaging to human relationships, communication skills and literacy. And I am completely hooked and check my account several times a day.

Again, as with technology, I didn’t jump onto the bandwagon easily. Back in another time and place, we had just finished painstakingly constructing our website for our amateur rock band, when suddenly nobody had websites anymore – everyone had Myspace pages (remember that?) No sooner had I got to grips with the friend requests and emoticons of Myspace, than I started receiving invitations to join this weird thing called Facebook. I resisted a long time, and then finally caved in and set up an account, early one Saturday morning, for no good reason (for some reason I remember this – I believe I was still in my dressing gown). That was the rest of the morning gone, and many, many hours since (although not as many as my Other Half likes to believe).

I have some genuine uses and excuses for Facebook. I live in a different country to most of my family and many friends, so it enables me to more easily keep in regular contact with more people, and provides a means of communicating and sharing in my native tongue. As many on my friends list are from school or university days, we are of the same generation, and are moving through life-changing events at roughly the same pace; as parenthood started kicking in, it was surprisingly useful to share gripes, worries, empathy and experiences with people I haven’t spoken to face-to-face (as opposed to face-to-facebook) for many years, and across a diverse network of people who have all known me, in some time, place and context, but don’t necessarily know each other.

But I sense that the current dominance of ‘networking’ format tools for communication is changing the nature of human interaction, and not in a healthy way. Once upon a time, if I wanted to get or keep in touch with someone, I wrote them a letter (later an email), composed and addressed for them specifically. (Okay, so bulk mail-shots and email lists are possible, and have their place – although I remember my mother’s dislike of receiving bulk generic letters from acquaintances with the Christmas cards, with the only personal touch being our names inked in at the top). With Facebook and the like, the author is the narcissistic centre of their “net” – the communication becomes much more one-sided, more about the author only. I can follow the lives of people I was at school with, or met once on a course years ago, without ever actually exchanging a direct word with them. (In truth, if it weren’t for facebook, I would have probably never had any contact with many of these people ever again in my life). I post about me -  how I am feeling, a complaint or idea I have, something I find funny or interesting and would like to share – but I just put it out there for others to make of it what they will, or ignore.

Of course, it is easy to show appreciation for a post by simply clicking the convenient “like” button, or to ‘share’ a particularly humorous or philosophical post on our own timelines/newsfeeds in order to bask in a little reflected glory. It is easy to add a ‘comment’, and maybe even start a bit of a discussion with friends of friends of the initial poster (I once had a dinging argument, comment-by-comment, with a guy I have never met who had put a bigoted, racist comment to something a mutual friend had posted, that I simply couldn’t let lie). But does any of this count as real communication? Is it damaging our facility to react with anything more complex than click-on opinions and typed one-liners?

I appreciate it when people share funny stuff, because I like to laugh; thought-provoking or socially aware stuff, because it makes me think; informative stuff, because I like to learn; personal news, because after all, all of these people were part of my life at some point, and it’s nice to keep up with what’s become of them. But I’m sure I am not alone in having ‘friends’ that also share their most inane thoughts and actions; photos of their cats or their lunch; umpteen ‘must-see-it-will-change-your-life’ videos; blow-by-blow accounts of illnesses circulating their families or their own bodies; every move they make (aided by the handy in-phone GPS functions). And the need to share all this, in my opinion, has gone far beyond conviviality amongst friends, to become a compulsion in its own right. For some, it seems, the priority is no longer to experience life, but to share it on Facebook.

Of course, I’m not obliged to read it, let alone comment it, “like” it or share it. If I don’t want to be bugged by people’s Facebook behaviour, it’s my responsibility to resist logging on. But the fact that all this is even possible, and seems to have become rather normal, adds to that specific type of worrying that is the subject of this blog. This move towards ever-more egocentric forms of communication can only lead humanity further down the road of its own destruction.