Facebook Cheapens Birthdays
by Steven Rossi on October 27, 2009 in Thoughts on Life
Birthdays are pretty strange. Some would argue that birthdays are stupid. It’s cool to celebrate someone, but a birthday is pretty arbitrary. Regardless, I realized the other day that Facebook’s birthday features cheapen birthdays.
Think about this for a moment with me. Before Facebook, a birthday would bring lots of cards and phone calls from friends and family. To wish someone a “happy birthday” took effort, and it was received as a sign that the birthday-wish-recipient meant something to the birthday-wish-giver.
Today, however, that’s irrelevant. No one knows when their friends’ birthdays are. Few people have birthdays written on their calendar. No, instead the average person notices the day on their Facebook sidebar that a friend’s birthday is approaching. On that day, they click the name of the lucky person, write “happy birthdaaaaay!!!!” and close their browser.
Comparatively, the latter means a lot less. To be fair, each person probably gets a lot more individual “happy birthday”’s because of Facebook. Many would argue that this method of spreading the news of people’s birthdays is helpful and successful. But—do birthdays celebrated in this way mean anything? And what larger cultural patterns do we see here?
by stephenbateman
On October 28, 2009 at 9:38 pm
I agree.