We bemoan social media as the source of all of society’s woes. Look, I’m hardly going to deny that these platforms do cause big problems which the online safety act isn’t going anywhere near far enough to regulate… but thing about technology is that it almost always starts out as being the miraculous answer to life’s problems, and equally often gets co-opted by less scrupulous people for nefarious purposes. We all know how the printing press changed the world but we wouldn’t go back and ban it, right? Even though it permitted the spread of many off-accepted-script new ideas, some better than others. And think of the telephone: despite what a useful game-changer it was, many people deeply resented how intrusive it felt as they were summoned by its shrill, insistent driiing any time by anyone. Come to think of it, I remember resisting owning a mobile phone for pretty much the same reasons! Now I’m lost without it.  But old fashioned phone lines could be tapped and we know that voicemails could be hacked,  we know that our mobile phone gives away a lot of personal information, but most of us wouldn’t leave home without it.

The Internet started life (like the printing press and the phone) as a means to connect people and speed things up. I can confirm, as one who is old enough to remember life before the Internet, that everything used to be more time consuming. I mean eveeeerything. Sure, we had fax machines (aaaw, remember the paper jams? Assuming your recipient’s machine had special, terrible quality paper in it) to share important documents,  as long as you knew the recipient’s fax number. And only if your recipient’s fax machine was plugged into the phone socket. And yes, you could, if you were smart and dedicated and organised, programme your VCR to record Eastenders (praying that you weren’t recording over something really important, like an unwatched episode of Friends). We absolutely did spend aaaages recording mixed tapes (in real time, using a bulky double cassette player pressing play and record, then fast forward/rewind until you located your next song by sheer determination) with our favourite songs that we’d recorded off the radio on a sunday afternoon (hoping against hope that the tape wouldn’t run out half way through a song either on the A side or the B side). And we wrote lots of things down on our post-it notes, which we plastered all over the house to remind us about important stuff. If we wanted to share a photo we had to squint at tiny negatives to determine which one it was and then take said negative to the photo shop and then wait for them to develop another paper copy. If you wanted to say pleasant things about your holiday rental, you wrote/doodled in their visitor’s book. It was as good a way as any to mark the fact that you woz there.

Marking the fact that we woz here, that’s a uniquely human urge. Social media allows us to do that. So now you don’t have to rely on your cave art to be remembered, you don’t need to be expensively mummified and entombed with all your worldly possessions, you don’t have to pay monks to pray for your soul, you don’t have to build cathedrals/mosques/temples, you don’t have to be a warrior king (or a ball-busting queen), a brilliant philosopher, or a world renowned scientist, or an evil genius. No need to pen a best-seller, no need to be top of the pops. Anyone can leave their ethereal mark in cyberspace just by sharing a picture of what they lovingly and effortfully cooked today. Which, in millennia to come, may be just as poignant as a prehistoric handprint on a cave wall. 

Which was basically graffiti; acting out the most primal of urges to be seen. To leave a mark, however small.  Just like the napoleonic soldiers who vandalised the Egyptian monuments and temples, literally saying they woz there. Or Banksy, if you think about it. Don’t get me wrong, I love his work, mostly because I agree with his world view, but he’s basically spray-painting on walls. His genius was his ability to use social media to amplify his (or her, who knows?) ‘Banksy woz here’ graf-I-mean-art. Kudos.

Social media wasn’t just responding to a deep human need to leave a legacy. Now we could not only record our existence easily and visibly, we could (in theory) broadcast it to millions. We could all be famous! But of course, it’s not that simple. Rich and powerful people can, as they always could, co-opt new technology to their advantage, using it to broadcast their stories to the masses. They can indoctrinate us ever more efficiently for better or worse (though we know that worse, unfortunately, gets more attention). The rest of us are, as ever, scrabbling for an audience. Condemned to creating ever crazier content to satisfy the algorithm, to be seen and heard, and liked and shared.

I suspect that, to a greater or lesser extent, we’re all partial to being the centre of attention, the protagonist, the one who calls the shots and controls the narrative. I guess it gives us the illusion of self-determination in a world where the reality is very different. But to be the hero of a story, you kinda need an audience. Social media will lure you in by promising you this elusive audience. Just like that. Effortlessly and for free. Even though we ought to know better than to believe anyone or anything that promises us the earth at zero cost or effort. But, to scammers’ unending delight, and sometimes our detriment, we tend to live (and act) in perpetual, borderline-crazy hope. To hope for more/better/sooner/cheaper, that’s human. But we are also capable of critical thinking, and we can pretty easily guess the consequences of our actions if we are brave enough to try.

I cannot lie, I’m a wee bit partial to an audience. Not just this blog (although I truly do appreciate you, loyal reader), I also confess to being in my element when doing our 36 week birth talk. I get all fired up, trying to prepare women (and their partners) realistically and reassuringly, for the most intense days of their lives. I’m lucky to have that outlet to channel my inner would-be-commedian to poor unsuspecting women! My audience isn’t huge, and it is captive, if not captivated! I get to counter some of the more dodgy information they may have picked up from social media and/or Google along the way. Not gonna lie, it’s a big job especially when well-meaning influencers promote unrealistically romanticised visions of childbirth. It gets more clicks than the rather less palatable truth. While I’m as much in favour of the unmedicated, unassisted labour as any soon-to-be mother (seriously, it makes my job much easier), I believe that timely, not-on-the-birthplan interventions, are life-saving game-changers. And epidurals (should you want or need one) are the best thing since hot, toasted, white, buttered-to-the-edges, thickly-sliced bread.

I might not be winning any popularity contests with this. I can live with that for today. But for posterity, I blog, therefore I woz here…