[Part 3: What did people write on my wall for my birthday?]
This tangent, we move forward to the second installment of Facebook birthday analysis: who, exactly, posts on one's wall on shis birthday? You might be thinking, "I have my own birthday and my own facebook wall. Why would I need this study to answer that question?"
Well, let me answer your fictional thought-question with a question: Do you have the time or inclination to scour through dozens and dozens of posts and think through how many ridiculously non-friend people show up or from which eras of your life the people hail? Assuming you have a job or a life, your answer's probably "No." My answer, however, is "yes."
Enough guesswork Q&A. I give you the two questions of today's tangent, both of which look at the personnel of my online birthday:
1. How close to me were the people who wished me a happy birthday?
This is, I think, one of the most interesting and pressing questions in our whole study of Facebook b-days. There always seem to be people showing up on your wall once a year whose name is barely recognizable, or whose last real-life interaction with you was a violent blood feud.
To answer this question, I had to (somewhat morbidly) assign closeness categories to my wall posters. Everyone fell into one of the following categories:
Family: relatives through blood or marriage.
Friends: people who have a consistent, positive presence in my life and from whom a wall post on a different day of the year wouldn't seem strange.
Barely: this weird limbo exists for people who are distant acquaintances or people who were in my life years ago. A wall post from them on any other day would be odd.
None: these people have absolutely no part in my life, and their post to me, even on my birthday, is somewhat mystifying.
Well, it's a pretty even split between Friends and Family (48%) and... everyone else (52%). It really goes to show how powerful a force the Facebook Birthday is -- it can create a social interaction that would otherwise never be there.
One final interesting note on this is that one person who posted on my wall existed on shis own special level of "No relationship." This was a person (friend of a friend) with whom I have literally never had an in-person OR online interaction. How we became facebook friends in the first place is an enigma. How a birthday post came about might literally make my brain explode with mystery.
2. From which phase of my life did these well-wishers first know me?
They say high school will be the best years of your life. Then when you're going off to college, they hope you've forgotten that statement and tell you the next four years will be the best. Middle school, well, everyone pretty much concedes that's going to be a dramatic, hormonal disaster.
But when it comes time for the annual "crawl out of the woodworks" online fiesta, which era will represent? In my social network, there are three 4-year time spans that figured to make solid birthday contributions: high school, college, and "Pittsburgh" (the four years I've spent here in grad school and with my current ministry job). And here's what happened:
As you can see, the general rule was that the more recent the era, the greater its contribution. There's a logic to that, as these are people I've met, become facebook friends with, and interacted with more recently. So the relationship, as "distant" or "non-existent" as it might have been on the previous chart, is fresher.
The one meaningless but funny exception to this law of diminishing wall posts was the dreaded middle school. We must have really all tried to blot that crap out of our memories. Except for my perennial locker and homeroom neighbor Cherie. The alphabet has a funny way of affecting unimportant parts of your future.
Help build momentum for the dramatic conclusion
Next time we'll look at the most interesting topic -- what, exactly, did people post on my wall? Until then, please tangent with me:
What's been your experience with super-distant people or mortal enemies wishing you a happy birthday on facebook?
Was middle school as bad for you as it was for everybody else?
Jon
From this point on, I will answer every single question you pose. Yes, even if they're hypothetical.
ReplyDelete1. Facebook users.
2. I was not thinking that, but I would need this study so that I would not have to go through the effort of putting together such capital charts and graphs.
3. I do not.
4. Using barometer of the redheaded stepchild of the MyFace SpaceBook social network family, LinkedIn, they are 1st level connections.
5. The part of my life when I was alive and cognizant of my surroundings; roughly this period lasts from 1989 through until the current.
6. See #5.
7. Words. Maybe a picture or two and a link to Tunak Tunak Tun.
8. I have had neither super-distant people nor mortal enemies wishing me happy birthday. Most of the time, my regular enemies and somewhat-distant people ignore it. In fact, it's pretty much just limited to people I actually know and who don't want me snuffed out.
9. It was a dramatic, hormonal success. Err, disaster.
hilarious, jon. for real, i laughed out loud at both this and the first part. especially at the fact that you keep linking shis every time you use it. hahahaha.
ReplyDeletealso, i absolutely hated middle school! so much. i am sure i would have 0% of posts on my birthday from the middle school years of my life.
great blog! can't wait for the final part!
sorry i did not contribute to the family section, as i was on a facebook haitus over your birthday!
Middle school having been one of my few school experiences changes my perception on it. That was actually one of the funnest times of my life. Elementary was just work all the time and Highschool was boring.
ReplyDelete