If you’re one of my 931 “friends” on Facebook, you’ve just participated in my first social media experiment.
I’ve been dreading turning 20-years-old for a long time. I’ve already determined that I will probably be one of those women who claims she’s “39” when she’s actually far past 40.
So when the clock struck midnight on Monday morning (aka my 20th birthday), it’s safe to say that I wasn’t exactly a happy camper. I was turning into an old lady, after all, and I could practically feel the wrinkles forming on my face.
Depressed, I logged onto Facebook, expecting to see a few wall posts wishing me a happy birthday. By 12:03 a.m., however, I hadn’t gotten any wall posts. I had gotten a few texts from close friends, but my Facebook wall was empty.
It suddenly occurred to me that my birthday was hidden on Facebook. A few days before my birthday, my evil suitemates changed my birthday on Facebook and I was forced to hide it before I could change it back. When I changed it back to the real date, I never un-hid it.
Most teenage girls would freak out at this point. I, however, was no longer a teenager. Instead, I decided to play a little game called “Who could remember it was my birthday without a Facebook notification?”
My friends thought I was crazy. “You don’t like getting a million Facebook notifications on your birthday?” they asked. Of course I like it – who doesn’t enjoy feeling extremely popular for a day? I figured that the fun I’d have doing this experiment would outweigh a hundred Facebook wall posts from random people I don’t even talk to anymore. It turns out that I was right.
I continued to sit and stare at my home page. A friend had finally written on my wall, and soon enough, more and more wall posts started appearing.
Was this because the people who wrote them had seen that first wall post and followed suit, or was it because they actually remembered that it was my birthday? My gut tells me to go with the first guess.
As I sat on my friend’s futon, I looked to my Facebook chat list and noticed that one of my best friends (and my ex-boyfriend) from high school was online. I did some Facebook “stalking” and also noticed that he had posted a “happy birthday” on one of our friend’s wall but not my own. He hadn’t texted me either. Instead of whining about how he had forgotten my birthday, I began to laugh hysterically.
Throughout the day, very few “happy birthdays” were uttered in conversations I had with my peers. Several people would see me at one point, see that people had posted birthday wishes on my Facebook wall, post on it themselves and then see me later in the day and apologize for not knowing it was my birthday.
There were even some cases when I would tell people it was my birthday and they didn’t believe me because “it wasn’t on Facebook.”
Was I offended by this experiment? Absolutely not. Why? Because I, believe it or not, am terrible at remembering birthdays without Facebook. If I didn’t have Facebook as a reminder, I wouldn’t know hardly anyone’s birthday except for my closest friends’ and family members’.
What’s even funnier is the fact that people continued to post “happy birthday” on my wall the following day. Every time a new wall post appeared, I had to laugh.
It’s strange to think about what life would be like without social media. How did people keep track of others’ birthdays before Facebook? Did they, heaven forbid, write the dates down on a real calendar?
I frequently vocalize that my iCal is my best friend, but if you look at my iCal, it’s filled with meeting reminders and events to attend. Nowhere on my iCal will you find upcoming birthdays. In my opinion, that’s Facebook’s job.
Yes, I could have made my birthday visible on Facebook and received a ton of notifications from random “friends” wishing me a happy birthday. This birthday, though, I learned that birthdays aren’t about the number of wall posts you get. And though I didn’t get many wall posts on my 20th birthday, there is one thing I also thankfully didn’t get: wrinkles.