The Evolution of Facebook on Millennials
If you were born 1985-1990, you graduated high school around the birth of Facebook. Facebook launched in 2004 and it was originally intended as a way for college kids to meet and stay in touch with their peers.
I graduated high school in 2006 and started college that fall. Facebook was all the rage. It was something you had to get. Like any college freshman, I had no idea what I was doing, and I desperately wanted friends, so I signed up. It proved to be a great way to stay in touch with high school friends who I just left and network with new college students from classes, ask them questions, and start the infamous ‘Facebook stalk’ on any and all crushes.
In the beginning of Facebook around 2006, I remember feeling guilty over only having 30 friends when others had 90.
We felt we had to grow our friends list to be worthy. Friend became a verb. We “friended” anyone we met - students in our classes, people from work, random girl your met at the coffee shop, people we just met at networking events, and even first dates. We invited them into our personal lives right away.
We felt like we had to stay connected. We must have more friends. That was surely the way to navigate college, get a job and get ahead, right? You never knew who would connect you with that incredible opportunity down the road, so “friend” anyone you meet.
Humans are social creatures by nature. In the past, humans relied on approval from their tribal groups – getting approval and being a part of a group gave you protection from your group. But those were groups of 10’s to 100’s.
Now we all have a huge group to gain or lose approval from -- our social networks in the 1,000’s. They can see, judge, have an opinion on and comment on everything you do. They’re all up in your business all the time!
No wonder we feel stretched thin on a daily basis. There are too many people to compare yourself to and in so we are losing our sense of self by comparing ourselves to every other person we see on the internet. It’s terrifying to live in our online world we’ve created.
We don’t have the mental capacity to deal with this need for approval online PLUS have strong personal connections in real life.
Remember when our parents' generation started to join Facebook? You had to explain to them the difference between their Facebook feed, message and a comment. You would watch them mistakenly make a public post instead of sending a private message or ‘poke’ your random friend from high school? (Remember the poke button? How useless was that?)
It was super funny how we were so “in” and knew how to use Facebook so well and they were so out of it.
But they had a great advantage to us.
The baby boomer generation having come into Facebook later got to be waaaaay more selective of the friends they accepted, which turned out to be a good thing. They get to be in touch only with the people they want. They get to curate their friend list in a way to have only their personal friends and family see everything happening in their lives.
Now the joke’s on us.
We have friends from the beginning of Facebook. We have become over-saturated with friends and connections.
We are still maintaining friendships from college and high school. We wouldn’t normally stay in touch with or see these people until our class reunions every 5-10 years. We don’t even want some of these friendships, but we didn’t know there was an option, or we don’t want to offend anyone by un-friending them. (Remember when friend was a noun and not a verb?)
We are inundated with constant communication and over-thinking our actions. We are being evaluated by our entire social network consisting of all our past co-workers, colleagues, bosses, exes, high school and college acquaintances, and being judged by ALL of them instead of just our small group of family and friends.
Essentially Millennials “grew up” with this platform. That’s what we know. And so today, we are still living in a college mindset of needing to always be in touch with all our friends all the time. We don’t know anything else. We don’t have a reference to live another way. So yeah, it’s hard to walk away from this mindset.
Do you feel too connected and like you’re going crazy or loving your sense of self because of this? Me too.
So how do we live in an over-connected world? Here are some ideas.
Self-Discovery. Think back to your college years beginning Facebook. How did you feel about Facebook? Excitement when you got a friend request from a cute person in your class? Or despair by not doing enough or not having enough friends? Or a little of both? How would you rather feel on Facebook? Inspired, connected with family?
Mindfulness. Change your mindset. Think who do you actually want to stay in touch with (and want to stay in touch with). In a pre-Facebook age, who would you actually call up on the phone?
Detox. Go through your friend list and get rid of people (sit with the guilty feeling and do it anyway)
Intention. Catch yourself when you are on Facebook and scrolling or falling into FOMO despair. Then call someone and talk to them. Your life and your friends IRL are the ones that matter.
Growth. Keep going. You’ll fall back into your old patterns, we’re all human. But keep in mind how you want to live your life separate from Facebook and keep moving in that direction. You got this.