Oct 01 - PRO TIP: Delete On Their Birthday!

Written by YGTV Team on 01 October 2014.

I walked from Piazza to Jury’s trying to make excuses for the person I said hi to and they didn’t say it back. I mean, maybe they were just being rude but maybe they didn’t see me; but they did look me in the eye. But maybe they didn’t have their glasses on or their contacts in. Or they were just having a bad day, sometimes I just don’t feel like having to stop and talk to the hundreds of people you see in town every day that you know. But you can just say hi.

All of this before I realised I didn’t know the person. And worst of all it’s not the first time it’s happened. A lot of random smiling and pretending to scratch my head mid-wave and I still haven’t learnt. And no, I don’t need to ‘go to Specsavers’, my eyesight’s just fine (I’m being polite, it’s perfect); it’s a lot more serious than that and it all boils down to spending too much time on social media.

Imagine this: You work with someone and regularly see them upload photos onto Facebook, photos of nights out, group dinners or whatever. So now you’re seeing the same people over and over, and your friend. So after a while you see this one person so much it feels like you know them, you’ve probably even clicked on their name and had a look at their profile. You know where and what they’ve studied, what their hobbies are and because Gibraltar’s so small you’ve already made the link that makes them related to your second cousin on your mum’s side. So naturally without even having been introduced by your colleague-friend-in-common and possibly without having seen this person in real life, you see them down Main Street and you say hi. And then you walk through most of town trying to figure out how somebody can be so rude.

When I first joined Facebook I was hungry, I was adding everybody I knew and people I didn’t even know that well, much in the same way that when you go to University you add all your flatmates, to network. I think I must have been somewhere close to the end of my degree when I thought: “really, do I need all these people I never speak to reading everything I write and seeing all of my photos?”

Out of laziness I kept putting it off and the only thing that made me take the plunge was job-hunting. I knew potential employers would be looking through my profile and nobody needed to see that horrible photo of me at the Beerfest sometime in maybe 2007 with a beer stain down the front of my t-shirt at the very front of a crowd watching Area 52. It’s a photo I love, for its comedic value, but nobody needs to see that. So I started getting rid of people, fixing all my privacy settings and now I have way less friends than I had back then and I’m almost certain people who aren’t my friend can only see a photo or two. And I feel a lot more relaxed about it all.

What got me thinking about this is that earlier on this week I got a couple of friend requests from people I don’t even know, friends of friends and people who maybe I’ve seen on a night out; and honestly I don’t know what to make of it. I might have been very add-friendly years ago but now I’ve become a bit of a grumpy old man and if I don’t know you and I don’t plan to meet you, like say for my People People project, I don’t need you on my friends list. And I know it sounds harsh but I’ve even gone as far as putting off adding someone in the hope they’ll add me instead.

But really at the end of the day the point is that we’re not meeting people, we’re just stalking them on Facebook, we have lost all our skills and have reduced them to a bunch of clicks. And as I look at this (growing) list of pending friend requests on my Facebook I wonder: Is this the virtual version of my awkward, mistaken ‘hi’ in town?

Mind you, they might be adding me because I said hi in the first place…

This article is the first half of a two-part article on internet usage in Gibraltar. Catch up with Stefano’s blog next week…