Happy Birthday, Mark Zuckerberg!- My journey growing up with Facebook, and what it meant to me

Today is Mark Zuckerberg’s birthday. It’s hard to believe he’s just 36 years old, and also rather depressing to know that he amassed all that wealth and achieved all that success in his mid to late 20s. In case anyone’s been living under a rock for the past 15 years, he’s the guy who’s responsible for Facebook. I’ve been using Facebook for the past 13 years, and so what better day to write about my memories and experiences over these past 13 years.

As someone born a year before the 90s, it’s fair to say I grew up with the internet, right from dial-up connections to Fiber Broadband or whatever the latest is, I just know ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ internet. Hotmail was my introduction to the internet in the late 90s, I still remember my ‘not totally not cringey’ email address, varcool@hotmail.com.It progressed to MSN Messenger with its cool ‘emoticons’, Gmail, and then, of course, Orkut with its ‘scraps’ which was the rage in my last 2 years of high school. But Facebook was my first real introduction to social media in 2007, just after I’d graduated from high school, which meant I fell in the perfect age group to discover the joys of the social network.

This was pre-Whatsapp, where text messaging was still the only way to really connect, so the idea of talking to your friends over the Internet was pretty novel. In the initial days, I don’t remember there being Facebook Chat (which is what Messenger was first called), so if you wanted to talk to someone, you had to go to their ‘wall’, write a post and then wait for them to reply. Of course, everyone could see this conversation so you had to be careful about what you wrote. You can tell who started using Facebook back in 2007, and who’s a more recent user simply by whether they call it a ‘wall’ or the more recent, ‘Timeline’. Also, you likely used the term ‘Social Network’ at the time, because it was the only ‘Social Network’ and not part of the broader ‘Social Media’. I also remember the Facebook groups, to which getting invited to join was the ultimate sign of acceptance and validation. And then, of course, Facebook Chat which came up a couple of years later, I think. I must have spent hours using the chat function, sending messages to everyone online with conversations not normally proceeding beyond ‘hey, what’s up?’ ‘Hey, nm, what abt u?’, ‘Nm’. Google it if you need subtitles.

Some more Facebook memories are the cringey status updates. The Facebook ‘Memories’ section is quite an ego crusher, but also a reminder of how far I’ve come since the status updates which started with ‘Is’ or ‘Feels like’ so it would read like ‘Is feeling hungry’ or ‘Wants to play tennis’. Yikes! Not to forget the albums of pictures, with every photo having a caption as they were painstakingly uploaded one at a time. Didn’t everyone have an album called ‘Random’ or ‘Miscellaneous’? It all seemed so important at the time, I remember rejecting multiple friend requests from my parents and other family members of that age. It was almost like Facebook was my diary, which I obviously didn’t want my parents to have access to. It’s only recently in the past 5 years or so that I felt comfortable adding them and letting them into my ‘online world’, which is quite endearing now that I think about it.

Facebook’s obviously not as popular as it once was. Flashier, shinier apps have taken over, and Facebook is now the app for ‘old people’. It also doesn’t help that my parents' generation has taken over Facebook, and while there’s no longer as much peer pressure as before, you still wouldn’t want to use the same thing that your parents use. Having said that, I still enjoy using the app. I don’t do any of the things I used to do before; upload pictures, update my ‘status’ or use the chat function, but it’s still my go-to app. I do not understand apps like Snapchat, and while I use Instagram, it’s too clunky and restrictive in terms of what you can do, for my liking. Also, I find my anxiety levels rising when I use Instagram too much, which means I often temporarily deactivate my account, which I don’t feel the need to do on Facebook. It might be the comfort level or the fact that it’s used by people of a broader age range, but I don’t experience those same feelings of anxiety.

I’ll probably have an account on Facebook till it ends up shutting down. It might not be as important in my life as it once was, but it will always be a part of my life and was omnipresent through my late teens and early 20s. Also, my first ever interaction with my now wife was back in September 2012.. on a Facebook chat window 😊

Thank you for reading!