"What's on Your Mind?"


Either people don’t like jokey Facebook statuses any more, or I’m no longer funny.

When I first joined the social networking service back in 2008 (I remember the year because it coincided with me and Glyn taking The Balloon Debate to Edinburgh) that was pretty much all anyone did, apart from those annoyingly vague, fishing-for-sympathy-without-telling-you-what-the-problem-is posts; if there’s something wrong, tell us, or don’t if you expect us to tease it out of you.

(I’m an irritable, impatient person in case haven't guessed.)

You were initially encouraged to write in a ‘David Ephgrave is…’ format, which cried out to be completed with surreal statements like ‘...half-Alsation’ or ‘...his own dad’. Then they simplified things by removing the prefix, opening the door to post anything you liked, from how tired you were to what you had for lunch.

Back then, we were all younger, and people of my generation probably didn’t have kids or mortgage payments to contend with. Life was fun back then, or at least that’s how my rose-tinted memory paints it. These days, if you haven’t produced offspring, and substituted your face for theirs in your profile picture, you don’t count. You may as well have contracted syphilis in public.

Coming back to site after leaving for a few years has only signposted the change. I now feel like I'm the odd-one-out. I’ve nothing to say that’s of interest to my own catchment; the only way I could wheedle back in would be to upload a million pictures of my cat.

This morning, I posted the following and didn’t get a single ‘like’. 

There’s nothing like shouting a gag into a vacuum to make you realise how things have changed; I might go back to MySpace.

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