facebook memories

i used to write a lot of FB status updates, so why not try again?

mock retrofuturist Facebook ad, via Moma Propaganda

I haven’t seemed to have had much luck writing substack essays lately– I start lots of drafts that end up spiraling out of my hands. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve been chronically sleep deprived for months thanks to my darling baby boy. But I ain’t no quitter, so I’m trying something a little odd: I’m writing this essay in a Facebook status update window on my phone.

I used to be quite a heavy Facebook user for a few years. Apart from the early years of sending ‘pokes’ to friends, endlessly tedious personality quizzes, and a bit of a Texas Hold’em addiction, I ran a few discussion groups that meant quite a lot to me at the time, and I would post links and articles and write my thoughts about them, and argue with people about them in the comments. A bunch of those people seem to no longer be active on Facebook, while a handful seem to be still arguing away with each other.

For a certain subset of users, I think the Facebook status replaced the personal blogpost. When I was about twelve, I remember I had a bunch of friends who all maintained their own blogs, on services like Blogspot, Xanga, Livejournal and so on. We’d all excitedly check in on each others’ updates, and leave comments, and we had some semblance of a digital social life that way. When Tumblr came around, a bunch of us got on Tumblr, where a lot of our communications would be in the form of reblogging other people’s content. In a way, a form of this behavior lives on in Instagram stories and DMs.

Some people still have personal websites and blogs (and I love them dearly), but for the most part it seems that most people are content to use a suite of apps like Instagram and LinkedIn and Twitter for those purposes instead. And I get it, it’s more convenient. Even my own website seems kinda vestigial sometimes these days, though I hold on to it stubbornly out of my childhood love for what the Internet felt like back then. I miss the era when personal websites were quite straightforwardly the way to go.

I wonder sometimes what happened to all the other people who hung out online with me. I think a lot of them have retreated to stable lil groupchats with a small cluster of friends, and they scratch their itch that way. I personally was never quite satisfied with that. My personal experiences of groupchats were always inevitably frustrating. Groupchats tend towards insularity, a handful of high-volume posters tend to dominate, and– maybe this was specific to a particular time– but an oddly high number of groupchats I was in all splintered after some big internal conflict. Maybe this is a thing with many IRL friend groups too; I don’t think it’s a purely digital or online phenomenon. I’ve seen many people talking about how there’s some uncle or cousin that their family doesn’t talk to anymore. Keeping a good thing going is hard, and if you have the skills to do it, it kinda makes sense to focus your use of those skills in domains that are more rewarding. This creates “missing markets” that are only served by thankless volunteers who are suckers for pain. (I say this with love, as someone who has always spent an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to mediate conflicts wherever I encounter them.)

I think a lot of people– probably the vast majority of people– think of posting as something casual, blowing off a little steam, sharing a funny meme, that sort of thing. I think the idea of taking posting seriously as a vocation is actually something most people consider inaccessible, like something you dream about as a teenager maybe, but then you give up on it when you don’t achieve substantial success within. It’s like wanting to be a professional musician, or a comedian. Posting after all is a kind of performance. Practically everybody tells stories and jokes casually when hanging out with their friends, but it’s a different matter to set out to do it professionally to a paying audience and to seek to make a living from it. I’m now remembering that when I identified as a blogger in my teens and 20s, the common assumption I’d hear from non-bloggers was that it was ‘just a hobby’. I heard similar things as a musician, too, sometimes framed as “but what’s your real job?” In Singapore, sometimes older folks would ask bluntly, “Music can make money ah?”

Back then I think I used to get a little triggered by that sort of thing– and significantly because, yes, it’s not easy to make money as a creative. I’m reminded of a Jack White quote that I can’t find right now, which went something like, “an artist is someone who has to work harder than someone with a regular job”. I’m sure you can think of some extreme jobs that are incredibly difficult, but my interpretation of Jack’s statement is that an artist, if they want to be successful, has to also be an entrepreneur.

Traditional mainstream jobs have a script that you can follow, whereas the artist’s job is to be sensitive to change— to be at the edge of what is known, of what is possible— and to communicate that meaningfully to people. The artist’s job is to take risks. If you’re not taking risks, you’re not producing art, you’re producing commodities and trinkets. Which, to be fair, even the greats had to do from time to time. When Leonardo da Vinci apprenticed at Verrocchio's workshop, it was basically a content farm, with workers mass-producing Madonna paintings ‘for merchants who wanted to display both their wealth and piety’. Christopher Nolan started out making corporate videos. I don’t think there’s any shame in that. We all have to eat. I actually think that being too precious about one’s art can get in the way of making good art, and I say this as someone who identifies as at least moderately precious. It might seem like a paradox, but it takes some realism to sustain idealism over a long period of time. You need to know what your constraints are, what the costs are, and how you’re going to pay them. If you can’t make a living playing original music, you might have to play covers at a bar, or teach music to kids, or work another job entirely. But if making good original music is truly your priority, your vocation, your calling, then you have to find a way to make it work somehow. If you’re serious, you’ll stick with it and figure it out.

I thought I was quite passionate about music, but along the way I encountered other musicians who demonstrated to me what real passion looks like. They lived and breathed music. They thought about it all the time. They practiced every day. Witnessing that made me realise that I’m not really cut out to be a professional musician. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. One can have a good time enjoying music, or any other pursuit, as an amateur. I’m reminded of Randy Pausch (I highly recommend his Last Lecture: video, transcript) talking about football, and how his childhood dream was to play in the NFL, and how he probably got more from not accomplishing that dream than he did from other things that he did accomplish. Simply operating in that domain taught him a lot about life. I feel similarly about music. I learned more from trying to make it as a musician and failing, than I learned from the 13+ years I spent in school. I’d do it all over again if I could, with more gusto.

But it turns out for me that my deeper itch has actually always been words. I tried to teach myself music in my teens, and managed to scrape by somewhat, but words I had always been obsessed with. I still find myself looking up the etymology of words all the time, because words are just so fascinating and compelling and important to me that I want to know every one of them as thoroughly as I possibly can. So I will press on cheerfully, writing more words.

There’s more I’d like to say about Facebook memories, but I’m running out of steam and have to learn to be content with compromise. So I’ll end by sharing a cute song from 15 years ago that pops into my mind from time to time, “about feeling amorous towards someone on a social networking site.”

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Post-script: I quite like how this essay turned out. It’s fairly casual and conversational. It meandered nicely into some of the things I like to talk about, without me particularly setting out to talk about them. And more importantly, I feel like I kept my train of thought fairly coherent, moving from point to point without disorienting myself. I think I could be happy writing and publishing an essay like this once a week, while simultaneously working on the more substantial pieces. I feel like I’m rediscovering some fluency with the essay form. My essay ‘muscles’ are ‘stiff’, and they need to be stretched with this kind of practice in order for me to do the more ambitious, dynamic things that I want to be doing with them.

I suppose I’ll end with a soft reveal: I’m developing increasing clarity that I want to focus this Substack on writing about a cluster of ideas around media, framing, literacy and so on. I had spread myself too thin with “all the channels at once” as a directive, it was like I was trying to record an entire career’s worth of albums simultaneously. I realise more clearly now that I ought to focus on one ‘album’ at a time. I like how a naming convention has emerged on Twitter where people use an artist’s initials followed by a number– so Katy Perry’s and Lady Gaga’s upcoming albums are called KP6 and LG7 respectively. I’ll borrow that: so we can say VV1 was Friendly Ambitious Nerd, VV2 was Introspect, and VV3 will be (tentatively named) Frame Studies. I don’t intend Frame Studies to be a single ebook or pdf, at least not yet. Rather I intend to write it as a collection of essays. I have some vague sketches of what those essays might look like, but the fun in the process is freestyling and surprising myself. We’ll see!