I don’t mean to brag, but I have had a top year on social media. A really top year. My Klout score has gone up by almost 0.3 per cent. I’m not saying I’m a Twitter celebrity, but, well…Mr Kipling sent me two boxes of free Cherry Bakewells, just for tweeting about them. (‘Yummy, Cherry Bakewells are delicious! Everyone should buy them!’ I said. Joke’s on Kipling because those sweet, sticky, jammy babies sell themselves.) Before the Insta-rapture, I briefly had almost as many Instagram followers as I follow. And I’ve just had an email from Ello saying that they can’t make any promises, but they might be able to swing me an invite in February.
Naturally, as 2014 draws to a close, I want to celebrate my social successes. When I go home, I want to be acknowledged as a high ranking digital native. I definitely have more followers than anyone else in my family - this might be because only forty per cent of my sisters are on Twitter, one hasn’t tweeted since her phone broke, and the other only uses it to send pictures of lettuce to Phoebe Lettice Thompson, ex MIC.
However, my family sees it very differently. Professionally dicking around on the internet is not worthy of praise and plaudits. At best, I am flighty, flagrant and guilty of pulling a confidence trick on the general public. My Dad keeps making ‘meaningful’ remarks about the South Sea Bubble (which I totally had to Google on the internet, which just goes to show, Dad, that the World Wide Web is here to stay.)
More seriously, I realise how much I get out of social networking when I spend a week with people who don’t care for it. And at first it’s frustrating to feel that we’re in the same house, but spending time in separate worlds - and slowly, I start to get it, and I realise with juddering horror that there’s a very good reason why no-one is bothered that my tweet got favourited by Sophie who used to be in Geordie Shore.
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I usually work from home, and social media - Twitter especially - is my office kitchen. I don’t, as such, have a manager to complain about (technically, that’s me) - so as a substitute, I fling myself energetically into draining, addictive internet wars. I need somewhere to procrastinate, and I don’t have anyone who will send me inspirational quotes in rainbow Comic Sans on group emails. But I have the internet. It’s where I’m ‘work me’. But my family don’t give a shit about ‘work me’. They have no interest in the version of myself that I present to virtual friends and well meaning strangers. They don’t want to hear about how my tweets about crisps were on a ‘trending map’/ They want to talk about the New Year’s Eve where I cheated at an elaborate running-around board game (It’s too complicated to explain but it’s on Amazon) and my sisters leaped on me like a team of Great Danes, and knocked me to the ground. It’s not that they don’t get the spirit of it - my Mum is a hashtag game ninja, only she thinks of the daft puns out loud and delivers them at rapid fire, because she doesn’t need validation from the internet. She’s just having fun.
At the end of my twenties, I still don’t feel that my family takes me entirely seriously, and that usually triggers a total teen style sulk on my part. But it’s hard not to be among digital refuseniks for a few days and think that they might be onto something. On every single night out I’ve been on this year, a lovely chat, intimate moment or silly dance has been ruined by someone whipping their phone out and saying ‘Do you want Amaro on that?’ I’ve turned against pals who are lovely in real life because I’ve been driven to despair by their self absorbed Facebook statuses (obviously I’m totally guilty about posting this sort of thing too) - but seeing daily examples of their narcissism makes me think ‘I never want to go for a drink with you again, and listen to that coming out of your mouth, of my own volition.’ And the holiday albums where it doesn’t matter if the caption is Taunton or Tahiti, you know you’re just going to see 25 shots of the same smug face in different statement necklace and bikini combos.
My parents raised me to believe that ‘endlessly going on about yourself’ was only slightly less bad than murdering everyone, and worse than getting a massive tattoo on your face. Yet I’m as awful as everyone I know when it comes to deriving self esteem from Likes and Favourites. Used judiciously, I think social media is a wonderful thing. It makes me laugh, it informs me and it’s helped me make some amazing friends. It’s also turned me into a self absorbed cretin, and I’m endlessly grateful to my skeptical family for reminding me that even if I turned up one year with a million Twitter followers, they’re much more interested in Jesus and his 12, and no amount of retweets is going to get me out of the washing up.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.