Less-than-social media?

The death of another social media?

Another day, another highly motivational or inspirational or otherwise well-intentioned post or picture on Facebook.

You know the ones

“Share this if your mom is the best mom in the world”

“Like this if you hate cancer”

“A best friend doesn't tell you to stop crying, but cries with you”

or some other such nonsense.

Why are they proliferating?

Fortunately they seem to be subsiding in favour of more classic memes and funny videos - Facebook has recently changed not only the ability to share, but also the embedding of shared videos to make this easier.

And it wasn't that long ago that the 'pay it forward' type videos were going around. You know, where the chap seemed to be asking for some change; whereas in fact he was asking us to change; the good deed carried on and repaid and that sort of thing.

Most of them are highly unoriginal, which kind of defeats the object of the message behind them. Is your mom really the best mom in the world if you are actually sharing someone else's image that has already been shared by half a million people around the globe? But usually they have a very simple, feel-good message behind them. They take no less than a second to like or share, and you can look as though you are doing some good, spreading the message, loving your mom in a slightly visible way.

Or at least until you start sharing so many of these things that people start hiding your statuses, blocking your account, unfriending you. That happened to a friend of mine; but maybe he didn't listen to my previous post on social media use. It certainly turned his timeline from a personal timeline into more of a community pin-board of hopes and wishes. He lost a lot of friends.

But why are they so common at the moment? Perhaps it is just that I am more sensitive to them - that there are many other categories of share which I don't mind so much, either because they are less intrusive, less irritating, or because I engage with them.

However, they are more common than they used to be though. A mere scan through my newsfeed last night confirmed that there are now more “share” posts than original statuses. Maybe there is a reaction - the media is filled pretty substantially with bad-news-stories, doom and gloom and cancer. People want an escape, they want to spread the love, they want stories which aren't doom and gloom. Maybe they think people actually care?

The posts generally fall into one of four categories - the motivational posts about how you should live your life, love your friends etc. (often with the old chain-letter threat that if you didn't share or like then the opposite of the intended motivation would occur); meme posts with a joke (or a satirical lampooning of motivational posts); 'cause' posts - ban animal cruelty, help find this van which was stolen, find these people that stole a van or were cruel to animals, support this charity, question whether the benefit/immigration policy is up to scratch etc.; and commercial posts - 'like' and 'share' this to enter our competition (including the fake ones claiming to be Apple giving away a random number of Macbooks which for some ungiven reason cannot be sold; and yet only having a few score 'likes'). We'll not consider the latter though.

But it seems as though people are reverting to motivational posts, memes and 'causes' as a reaction to how 'social' social media has become.

The fact is: People are getting wary of Facebook.

It has tried to be too social, too public. It has tweeked its policies to allow it to share more of your things, tweeked its settings to automatically share some of your things, developed functions that don't allow you to disable the ability to share some things. And people are responding to this. They are concerned with updating their status or their check-in; they are more reluctant to upload photos: the data might accidentally be public, might disclose where they are when they are somewhere they are not supposed to be; show them having fun when they weren't supposed to.

The fault for this isn't just Facebook, but the users. As more users are being publicly challenged, either trial by criminal court, defamation proceedings, by media or by professional colleagues; so they become more cautious. Suddenly that drive to have over 200 friends, 300 friends, 500 friends has left people questioning whether they want to post anything at all. Looking through my feed last night I hid posts from someone. All of her posts were 'cause' posts about vegetarianism, anti-animal cruelty etc. I had to delve right back into the recesses of my mind to work out why it was that I was friends with her in the first place: we had met once, at a dinner party four years ago.

I have recently been recruiting for a vacancy at work. One of the things that I did was check through Facebook to see if the posts of any of the candidates were visible, controversial or has some other potential to bring them or the company into disrepute. The next thing I checked was whether we had any mutual friends who could tag me in their photos, thereby exposing me (or the candidate) to risk. And in the days where some of your 500 friends are people who you only met once at a party four years ago, there is increasingly this risk. In a world of 500 friends there are a lot fewer degrees of separation than six - the http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15844230"target="_blank">latest statistics suggest it is closer to 3.74. I enjoy being reasonably 'free' on my Facebook, hence why I don't have work colleagues as friends on there, so I don't want an incoming colleague to already be a friend, or a friend one removed. This also presents itself as a problem for my colleague who is leaving to travel the world - I would actually like him as a friend, however he will also be friends with a number of other colleagues. That simply can't be done.

As an example of the problems that can be caused, take this weekend.

This weekend a very good friend of mine is getting married. Unfortunately I will be unable to attend. This is perfectly legitimate and entirely down to various logistical problems, not least the wedding taking place on a Sunday night, quite a distance from my home city on a day where train engineering works mean that in order to get home at a sensible time for work on Monday I would have to leave the wedding just before 10pm, which (as the party doesn't start until 7:30pm) ends up being a practical impossible situation. I have offered my apologies.

In an entirely separate development, I am off down to London this weekend. This has been eased by my non-attendance at the wedding; but was not conditional upon it. I would still have been able to go to both London and the wedding had other logistics not got in the way. In fact my return train was timed on the basis that I was going to try to attend both.

However, there is a risk that a conclusion could be drawn that I could not attend the wedding as a direct result of my trip to London. This therefore means that I am going to have to ask my friends not to tag me into places or in photos for the weekend, until the conclusional risk has dissipated. Fortunately my London friends seem to have started drifting away from Facebook anyway, so the risk is minimal.

But is this caution a signal of the death of social media - or at least social media in the current form? From the memes, causes and motivational posts, social media seems to be about being more social with other public media, rather than publishing more about your own social life. It doesn't take long for the bubble to burst. I know I keep going by to the Myspace example, but in 2008 it was overtaken by Facebook as the most popular SM site. Now it doesn't feature in the stats, so quick was the demise. Yes, people are fickle; but they are also now getting educated about this new form of communication. And whilst Facebook tries to push the boundaries of 'public' and 'social', it takes more than a company to redefine these terms for all of society. If the changes are imposed upon us, we react in a manner that the company cannot control: we withdraw. The only thing currently working in Facebook's favour is that there is no challenger to the crown, no-one operating for the benefit of the users, no-one to capitalise on Facebook's faults and failings. Diaspora was supposed to, but never really took off.

So, is this the death of Facebook? Really?

Well, I can't help but think that - whilst not the end - it may be the beginning of the end. Whether because of people actually getting stung, either by a scam or an ill-considered post which has repercussions at work; or because of the increasing wariness of witnessing others get so stung; or because of a frustration that the site is no longer what it was - that whilst it has tried to change “social media” to be inherently more “social”, it has in fact changed the meaning of “media” from “personal” to “meme”.

[Since I started writing this back in December and finished it on 21st March, there has been the resignation of the Youth Police and Crime Commissioner for Kent after her social media history came back to haunt her. We await to see if this has a further chilling (or normalising) effect on social media]