Wot No Social Media?

I have found myself mindfully strolling through the nostalgia of my youth recently, whether it is wistfully remembering my early teens during each series of Stranger Things or being jolted straight into my 6^th Form college days whilst inhaling the reminiscences in the wonderful film Blinded by the Light.

Whilst ambling through the memories though I often wonder whether there are elements of modern day social media I would have liked to have had access to during my formative years? The default position for those of us who have now been granted admission into the midlife club is usually thank Mary Mother of Jesus that we didn’t have social media back in our day, or something less blasphemous but possibly more sweary.

I agree that with social media comes unhealthy comparison with others, potential for damaged reputation, regular humiliation and a marked lack of human interaction (other than a hasty pose for the requisite night out selfie). You could pop all of this into a shoe box, labelled with the category, ‘detrimental to mental health’ and leave it for the historians to examine, discuss and peruse over in future years, deciding that this may have contributed to human decline.

However, as each gain in year creates an even greater distance between me and that girl ready to dip her toe into the delights and fears of adulthood, the manual filing cabinets in my brain have started to become disordered, are missing information and some of them have now jammed shut forever. This is the point when I have a faint yearning to transport myself back to those times, armed with a smart device in order to capture the information that would make me snigger and connect now.

There was the time at Polytechnic when I drank 10 tequilas with my housemates on my birthday and was apparently lying on the pavement outside the Mexican restaurant for some time, laughing hysterically at my own silent joke; there was the occasion during 6^th Form College when I yanked my drunken stupor out of bed following the previous night’s Blackpool trip only to notice a horrific love bite on my neck which I hastily concealed with a scarf (I’d apparently been snogging on the coach but god knows who with); there was the time when I apparently climbed to the top point of a four level drunken human pyramid at one of the many parties during my student placement at Esso – ta da!. All these apparentlys could turn into a reality had they been recorded on a smart device. The parties on the beach, the parties in houses; the concerts to see REM, James, EMF; the love struck romances that I thought would last forever. I would love to see them now to reminisce, giggle with friends and possibly share on facebook to demonstrate that I did have frivolous fun once, but would I really have wanted evidence of every one of these situations at the time they happened? Human pyramid, parties, concerts, probably; the rest, probably not.

What is definitely missing for me though is that ability to retain connection. I have lost any way of discovering and reconnecting with many friends and acquaintances from my past due to being forgetful with surnames and disorganised with documenting names and addresses. There’s Allison who I shared a house with in my first graduate job; there’s Julie who was my housemate for a year during my industrial placement; there’s Andy, the travelling buddy I met in Canada who became my closest mate during the months I was there. I either have no surname or just a common surname and I can’t find these people via any social media app. And I have tried; ‘Andy from Leeds’, doesn’t quite work with a Facebook search and I’m so desperate to reminisce about Toronto with Andy from Leeds.

So if I could don my monkey boots, put on my hot pants, slip on my donkey jacket and take myself back to 90s Nettie, I’d say you can have the instant photography, I’ll just take the ability to make social media friends until the time I decide to unfriend them.