What are they doing now?

I don't have Facebook to casually stalk people.  That's one of the reasons why I got rid of it in the first place, so that people could not do that to me.  There are very few people who I spoke to through it who I do not have another way to contact now.  As for those I have no contact with, most were people that I knew but wasn't that close to, they were "friends" as far as Facebook was concerned but they were really just people I knew existed who knew I existed, that was about it.  There was an expectation that you should accept friend requests from people who you had actually met, and might see again.  One of the reasons I was reluctant to do that when I did use the site was that I didn't feel any connection to those people, not in a sense that I didn't care what happened to them but just in a sense that I knew nothing about them they knew nothing about me, and neither of us made any attempt to change that.

When you think about the number of people you will meet in your lifetime, through where you live, where you study, where you work, to random encounters, both platonic and romantic - although in my experience the latter involved very little romance.  This list grows far quicker than you would imagine.  When you first created an account on a site like Facebook, one by one the requests start pouring in from people who you barely even knew.  I say "when" here in the sense that I now question how often this actually happens now.  Facebook supposedly had user growth of 22 million per month in the middle of 2018.  The question that raises for me personally is, who is signing up?  Almost everyone I know who is inclined to use the site already does, as for the rest like me they don't use it and have no intention of doing so.  So the question remains, at what point can you reach everyone you can reach?

For Facebook that means they now focus on expanding within emerging markets, countries where the site doesn't do that well.  For the individual however, there is a question of what point have you added everyone you are going to add?  Do you actually have an interest in each person on your friends list?  If I was to ask you what X is doing now - not in the literal sense but in a sense of having been to University or School years ago with X, where are they now and what are they doing, how many people in your friends list could you actually give an answer for, without going and looking?  How many peoples' lives who you supposedly have a vested interest in, could you actually describe and relate to another person?  If the answer is very few, then I would sincerely hope that you also spend very little time on the site, if the answer is very few and you spend a lot of time on the site, then what are you actually doing when you are on there?

One of the problems with social media, particularly when it comes to those sites where we connect with people we actually know, is that there is an inevitability that sees you gauging the success of failure of your life as you perceive it against the success or failure of other people as you perceive it through those sites.  The trouble with making these comparisons is that you know your own life, but the snapshot of the lives of other people you are exposed to won't necessarily be accurate.  Ask yourself how true to your life do you think your social media profiles really are?  If there is any disparity, do you believe that same disparity exists for others?

When people think of social media and the term fake news, they often think of news stories that attempt to shape your perception of the world, very little thought is given to the posts made be other people about their lives and whether they are actually true and how those posts attempt to shape your perception of their lives.  How hard would it be for you to convince other people of whatever you want to about your life through social media alone?  Could you easily make them think you were rich?  Could you easily make them think you were successful?  Could you easily make them think you were happy?  Do your social media profiles try and convey those messages and do they match up to reality?  If there is disparity then it would be better to take a step back and think about who you are living your life for, is it for yourself or is it for the entertainment of others?