Reminders Online

 The Nation

A few months ago, my Facebook account went through a few changes in the privacy settings department. Besides making certain posts visible to friends only, I also hid my birthday.
There are a few reasons for this. Early last year, I decided I wasn’t going to wish people for their birthdays unless I knew these people very well. I find birthday wishes that aren’t genuine both insulting and a waste of time. And since I never wished people, they wouldn’t want to wish me either, right? So to make everything much easier for everyone, I hid my birth date from the world. People also need not wish me for the sake of wishing me. Thus by not knowing when the day is, they wouldn’t feel obliged to wish me.

And so the day remained hidden from Facebook, and when I got to my birthday, very few wished me. Which I had no issue with because I now didn’t have to comment on the many posts that one’s wall is covered in like graffiti on birthdays.

This is where it’s important to remember that this is not about saying one community is better than the other. This is certainly not a comparison between two types of ‘friends’.

On twitter where I have fewer followers than I have Facebook friends, one wish led to another, and soon, tweeps I didn’t even know were wishing me. This is a usual thing over there, where, guided by the blue bird, tweeps celebrate even the most minor events. However, especially regarding birthdays, they never receive reminders or notifications. They only know through the tweets of other people, and the message spreads quite quickly. And so the day ended with maybe ten wishes on Facebook, of which most were family and (work) friends, and so many on Twitter. The latter is a place I rarely used to interact with other Sri Lankans until a few months ago, and so the wishes from tweeps known and unknown meant a great deal.

The moral of the story is that how close our friends are depends on how much information we put up on social networking sites. Relationship status, birthday, milestones, notes and the many posts we put up are the main source of information for many. It is quite disheartening to think that our friends, some who we talk with day and night, only know so much about us because of what we post online.
Thus, if you strip your online accounts of all information, people will suddenly realize they only knew your surname or school or place of work because the answers were just a few clicks away. If you decide to deactivate your various accounts and go on a period of absence, people will soon forget you, they will forget you ever existed, or commented on their posts or spoke with them.

Is anyone to blame? Can we point fingers and accuse people of not knowing anything about us, when we are just like them? We remember those details about family and our closest friends. We remember because we care about them. The rest, even though you studied with them in the same class for years, you don’t care enough about them. They are ‘friends’ and not friends.

In the end, the people who matter aren’t those who leave a ‘HBD’ on your wall. They aren’t the people who need a reminder to wish you. The people who love you, and care for you, are those who stay up till 12 mid- night to wish you; those who make an effort to type more than HBD or Happy B’Day.