Honestly... I miss Facebook

Posting will never be the same without the social rolodex of a lifetime

We often discuss how today's social media is hyper-focused on performance: looking good, sounding smart, appearing cool, not giving a shit, giving a shit. This current cycle is in stark contrast to the social media I grew up with. 

My mom finally let me create a Facebook account a few weeks before starting eighth grade. 

It was August 2009 and, up until that point, my home bases were AIM and YouTube. (I came of age at the tail end of MySpace’s reign.) 

On AIM, I would all afternoon for the cutest boy in school, @slickpenguin11, to come online. I updated my status so everyone knew whether I was home or at lacrosse practice or at rehearsal for whatever show we were doing at the time.

Everyone in my Buddies list was a personal connection. There were randos from school, friends from theater, friends from camp, and even a cousin’s friend from camp in the case of Cliff, whom I ran into on the first day of college because he lived down the hall from me, and whom I still run into in Manhattan on a quarterly basis. 

So, the world was small then and it’s small now. For a while, my little AIM world kept it sorted, organizing everyone I could possibly want to talk with in one place. 

Things were different on YouTube. I found privacy in the anonymity of being a viewer on a broadcast-based platform. My friend Jenny, who had also introduced me to Webkinz in fourth grade, taught me how to create a YouTube channel. 

“But I don’t know if I’ll actually make any videos,” I said (…this proved untrue later, which is a subject for another blog).

“That’s not the point! Look how fun it is,” explained Jenny, helping me add Taylor Swift’s “Teardrops on my Guitar” to my page because I had a crush on a boy named Drew. 

By 2009, I’d been an avid YouTube viewer and AIM chatter for years. With two older brothers who were already in high school, I was dying to get on Facebook. 

I was right to be excited. God, it was amazing, the expansion of that AIM bubble into a network, rife with full names and pictures and interests and seemingly more to do than I’d ever before encountered. 

Having just returned from camp, I rushed to upload an album of photos, careful to tag the right Julias. I played FarmVille. I debated whether to add my older brothers’ friends as Friends. I messaged my on-and-off middle school boyfriend Alex, who had my magic formula of being cute, having red hair, and thinking I was pretty. 

It’s no surprise that with undiagnosed ADHD and that level of social-platform enjoyment, my relationship with the internet was not the healthiest. I wasted hours and hours a day on that website, talking to people I didn’t need to carry out conversations with and going back and forth with friends I’d see in school the next morning. 

But still. Even being bored on Facebook was fun. 

For a long time, Facebook did serve its original purpose as a social-life rolodex. Mark Zuckerberg et al were obviously right – we needed this, and it shifted the pace of social-platform expansion, changing the playing field and paving the way for a world wherein TikTok trends turn on a dime. 

But it’s kind of sad that my peers and I, the Millennial-Gen Z cuspers born neither here nor there in the mid-90s, are the last generation to have experienced such a platform. 

From looking through Friends lists, you could surmise how someone's cousin knew that girl from history class. There is no place we can do that kind of social sleuthing or tracking now. In a world without this version of Facebook, it's hard to find people from our pasts, keep up with old friends. 

Matt Klein and I spoke about the “death of the rolodex” in December 2021 for his fantastic newsletter ZINE, which is to say that I have been thinking about this for a while. 

Younger generations, including my fabulous 16-year-old sister Eva, are never going to create Facebook profiles en masse such that the site would serve as a rolodex like it did for us. 

Now, we can only easily see those who try to be seen. It’s easy to hide anonymously in today’s popular platforms, viewing and perceiving and occasionally engaging like I always have on YouTube. 

As my friends and I use Facebook less and less, the pressure increases to post more on Instagram and TikTok: which are undoubtedly now performance-based platforms, incentivizing content development over social connections. 

While this appears to offer more privacy, in reality it just offers increasing anonymity to some, and an incentive to be too public for others. 

The result is a mismatched digital record of our past and present social circles. 

I miss the old Facebook.