We have all been there, it is two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and you are gently nursing a raging hangover and desperately trying to piece together the memories of the night, when just before a McDonalds dash you jump onto Facebook, for your hourly fix, and there they are; the only thing worse than the ‘Morning after the night before’ the photos from the night before! That little word ‘tagged’ sends your stomach somersaulting even more so than last night’s Sambucca.
Now it can go either way here, you can breathe a sigh of relief as you find some cute, fun and then steadily drunker photographs which most importantly make you look relatively thin and well put together or you can discover the other ones, the ones that make you cry in horror and instantly feel you should burn that betrayer of a dress.
Post shock you can convince yourself it was the angle or the lighting that made you go so horrifically from Anne Summers to Anne Widdecombe and as your heart rate begins to regulate you can hit the life line, ‘DE-TAG’, but the reality is it will not disappear. There is no denying we all edit our profiles to ‘market’ ourselves in a certain way, and if you disagree with this statement as you are a ‘ I- don’t- care- what- people- think- of- me’ kind of a person, I can assure you, your Facebook will still reflect this. So whether through an act of vanity or just control what should you do when that ‘snap-happy’, ‘tag-happy’ acquaintance interferes with your cyber image? And if there are no rules against shamelessly uploading people at their most unflattering angles should there be some when it comes to tagging the intangible?
I confronted my room- mates with these questions receiving a mixed response. One friend very honestly stated her view that you should only ever tag yourself while another promptly disagreed arguing that people’s Facebook have become too staged and styled and that it is a vital part of networking. One then told horror stories of a tagging trauma; let’s just say what happened in Napa did not stay in Napa!
As I contemplated our 21st century ‘logged in’ society, where you are not officially in a relationship until you update your Facebook , I began to realise there is no escape. This thought was then reinforced when I overheard two boys no older than fourteen’s conversation in which the phrase “She looks ‘fitter’ on Facebook!” was used, this both amused me a made me thankful Facebook was not popular through my awkward, chubby years.
The truth is we all have embarrassing, unflattering or rather forgotten disasters in life and this is not something that is by any means new, the only thing new is that they are now conveniently store for us in an album (usually named after the party anthem of that month) in case we ever feel like reliving them. So maybe we just need to accept that this is now part of life and see it in a positive light; some might say Facebook should make our generation more conserved but there is no point in remembering the night if Facebook will for you!
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