Joanna Schroeder challenges a viral video’s assertion that Facebook is basically a haven for lies and narcissism intended to make people’s lives look perfect.
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There’s a pretty amazing video going viral on Facebook right now by the Higton Brothers, courtesy of the fantastic “awesome stuff” site Sploid. It features a good looking, but somewhat average dude who realizes that he can get a lot of affirmation from Facebook by posting positive, upbeat stuff on his page.
He starts by boosting his TV dinner to “sushi with my girl” and moves on to completely fake long-distance running, and quitting a job he’s fired from.
The more positive stuff he posts, even when his girlfriend dumps him for another guy, the more “likes” he gets and it becomes an addiction.
Whit Honea, author of The Parents’ Phrase Book also shared the video, but he did so with the note that he doesn’t think people are being all that dishonest online, and he would know. He has a very successful blog, is a member of a wildly popular dads’ group online, was the Dads & Families editor at The Good Men Project, and works on many platforms online.
The argument against [this video]: I think most people do try to focus on the positive things in their life, but I fail to see how that is a bad thing. Even if people are projecting a happier version of themselves than what they face in the mirror, they are most likely doing it because that is what they need to see, and that’s okay, too. Also, there is no lack of hardship and sadness on Facebook, and it often results in real compassion and things being done. People can alter the context in which something is presented, but we control the context with which it is perceived, and if nothing else that seems like a pretty good balance. I’m tired of being cynical.
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Whit’s right, and he’s seen that compassion first-hand a few times, including when his mother passed away just before Christmas this past year. Prompted by a fellow dad-blogger, nearly everyone who knew and loved Whit changed their profile pics to a candle in remembrance of her life and in support Whit’s family. When another dad blogger, Oren Miller, was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer recently, the online community rallied not just with friendship and love, but with financial support so his family could take an epic holiday together.
We see it around us so often. A friend of mine was going through a depression and posted about it, tentatively, on her Facebook. The young mother and author was moved to tears by the love and non-judgmental support she received from her friends.
But when we are posting the positive, the fun, the funny, the beautiful and the epic stories of our lives on Facebook, and choosing not to post the worst moments of the day, are we really being deceptive?
I firmly believe that you don’t need to see every single bad thing I’m saying, doing, or feeling, and if I only share photos of happy or lovely moments, it’s not because I’m trying to deceive you. It’s because I don’t think anyone needs to know every single crappy thing happening in my life. I have shared photos of friends’ gravestones, of balloons released on the “angel date” of a beautiful baby in our family who passed away. But mostly, I share the lovely and the adorable, the romantic and the silly moments of my life.
Not that anything particularly crappy is happening. I have a great life. But I have the same daily annoyances and depressions as everyone. I HATE the mess in my house right now, my chest hurts with stress, my laptop inexplicably completely died yesterday and I’m not able to replace it at this time if it turns out it can’t be revived… There are people in my life I’m frustrated with and others who have hurt my feelings. That’s the everyday life of nearly everybody.
But what I share online about my life is what I really feel about my life. It’s happy, and it’s lovely. My kids ARE delicious and my husband is a god among men in my eyes. I feel all those things. Not every second, or even every day, but it’s how I feel about life in general.
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I don’t need to share every bad moment or gripe on Facebook for my timeline to be real.
I think Sploid’s video is good and is important in some ways, but I don’t think the happiness you see reflected on Facebook is necessarily deception. I think most of the time, what people share is how they feel about their lives, and I think it creates the narrative they want to to focus on. They want to remember the strawberry patch and the afternoon streaks of sun behind their kids, they don’t want to necessarily remember the diaper blowout in the car, the sudden downpour of rain, the mosquitoes breeding like a mutant alien species in all the snowmelt from this past epic winter. They want to remember the beauty that they believe characterizes their lives.
And that’s okay. In fact, it’s quite wonderful.
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Oh, but the poopy shoes and the backstory would have made your pic all the more interesting! 😉
Posting positive moments of your life is different from posting lies from your life.
I am friends with my Kindergarten teacher who has to be at least 80 years old. Every time I post something, I think to myself would I write this in a letter to the most conservative, sweetest person I know. This has helped me hold back on some of the things that I might have otherwise posted.
I think the bigger point of the video that is being missed by many is that, since we leave out the gray areas of our lives on social media, the readers of our posts can start to get an unrealistic view of what their life is supposed to be like. Some people are better than others at flipping this jealousy switch off. I’ve had FB friends come up to me in real-lfie and say that they are jealous that my wife and I “travel so much” and they wish they could do that. Traveling is cool, but we only travel… Read more »
This video was made in Norway and I think something is lost in translation here. Norwegians traditionally put an enormous emphasis on authenticity and unpretentiousness. They are very wary of facades, and don’t operate with many sophisticated social layers. And nonetheless Norwegians are as likely as anybody else to curate unrealistically glossy realities in social media. So I can imagine the cognitive dissonance is a bit greater there than in cultures that traditionally are more used to adapting to shifting social contexts. I live in the southern U.S. and whenever my countrymen and women come to visit, I’m always fascinated… Read more »
So this would mean that when everyone doesn’t tell you about the worst parts of their lives they’re being deceptive? Life is complicated, but it can’t be this complicated. Someone please clarify…
The people making the video seem to assume that everyone is the same, and that no one posting positive updates on Facebook or other social sites can’t possibly be telling the truth, not to mention the last scene where the posts are blocked. My friends and family are always supportive, like when I posted a few weeks ago that I lost my job. Immediately, I had people offering condolences, advice, and sending me links for potential jobs that I might apply for. People like my parents, brother, sister-in-law, and best friend.
Facebook is different things to different people. For me, it is not an intimate conversation among close, trustworthy friends, with whom one should be honest and feel safe to be real. It’s cocktail party conversation with many people one knows at varying degrees of closeness. One is best received when the content is light, witty, and engaging. This is not to say that politics, or heavy topics, or sadness is unwelcome, but it is (and should be, perhaps) occasional rather than be allowed to set the dominant tone. Who would come to that party, otherwise?
I tend to post photo’s of fun events going on in my life because strangely I don’t take photo’s of crappy stuff, sue me. If I post a status update I usually try and make it creative and/or funny (yeah sometimes I don’t succeed) this includes poetry and short stories. I like taking the mickey out of crap memes, and there are a lot of crap memes and if I post a location update it’s generally because I want to let friends know I am in town to catch up. I don’t confuse facebook with real life, it’s just a… Read more »
^^^ This is exactly the point of the video. No one takes pictures of crappy moments, and you aren’t expected to. He didn’t take a pic of his g/f leaving him, or his boss firing him. The video is merely pointing out that, despite all of the fun pictures someone might post, you’ll never know the living hell that person might actually be going through. Don’t be jealous of each other’s lives was the big takeaway for me, which seems easy to do, but some people just get caught up in it.
All that video did was make me feel shitty for how few likes I get when I honestly post about all the positive things that happen to me. 🙂