2 weeks Ago By Wendy Syfret
Last month was my birthday, and pretty much no one remembered. The social silence was a distinct departure from the old days when I’d be woken at dawn by a ricocheting messages from everyone I’d ever met. Despite the quiet, I didn’t take the lack of well-wishes personally.
In my younger years, I would have worried that I’d gone from darling to outcast overnight. But this year, I understood a deeper truth about the phone lying still in my pocket: This birthday lull didn’t represent my fall. It represented Facebook’s .
As more people leave Facebook, remembering birthdays has become harder. Anyone who isn’t a Boomer sharing election misinformation or AI images of Jesus can tell you that Facebook no longer holds the cultural position it once did. Despite over a third of the global population still using the platform, the social media behemoth has struggled to retain relevance among young people.
In 2022, Pew Research reported that in less than a decade, the percentage of teenagers using Facebook had fallen from 71 per cent to 32 per cent, while teen users of Instagram and Snapchat had increased substantially. Deeming the platform cringe, Gen Z has largely fled to TikTok and YouTube, while Millennials – Mark Zuckerberg’s generation and Facebook’s original key audience – are also migrating from Meta’s more chaotic platform to the more soothing (and superior) algorithm of Instagram. A lot has been said about what this culture shift means.
Yes, it speaks to a growing distrust in vampiric tech monstrosities (or at least an alliance to different monstrosities). It also reflects growing anxieties over data harvesting , and the fact there is a lot of junk on Facebook now. But whatever our reason for abandoning ship, the impact of breaking up with a technology that many spent the majority of their lives tethered to is stark.
Loading I joined Facebook in high school. Most of my friendships have always existed in this liminal online/offline space, and until a few years ago, the bulk of my personal photographs and communication were housed somewhere on the platform. For at least a decade of my life, there was hardly a single party I attended that wasn’t initiated with a red notification bubble invite.
And it was where I celebrated, and was reminded of, the birthday of every person I knew. During my personal Facebook peak – AKA my early 20s in the early 2010s – forgetting a birthday would be almost impossible. Checking my account compulsively, I would be prompted to celebrate my “friends”.
It didn’t matter whether they were family or a distant acquaintance, I did my civic duty and wrote “Happy Birthday legend!” on their wall before the day was through..
