Play all audios:
Often, when I look down at my phone and find it running miserably out of battery, I know I must do THREE simple things.
I have allowed three bite-sized apps to run my life, and I am hopelessly and irrevocably hooked. That blue ‘F’, that tiny little bird, that camera – abnormally large and ill-proportioned –
must DIE, I tell myself hopelessly, switching them off at night. Only to wake up the next morn, head firmly on my pillow, furiously scrambling to my three fixes. Worlds may have changed in
the Facebook/Twitter/Insta universe (you don’t know!) and I must stay ahead of the curve.
The REAL question though, dear social media peeps, is, which of the three you prefer to document your equal-parts-fabulous/equal-parts-irrelevant life? When you’ve got the three right in
front of you and need to tell the world about your toe fracture/the rainforest and its impact on you, your neighbour’s tetanus shot – who do you turn to?
Did you think you could use ALL three for your various concerns? Tsk tsk. So social-media-rookie of you.
WORKS on Facebook: Go forth and bombard Facebook with your pictures of eating soup while looking provocatively at the camera. Facebook’s very welcoming of these.
DOES NOT WORK on Twitter: No one on Twitter gives a damn. You’ll receive no retweets, no favourites (unless it’s your mum).
DOES NOT WORK on Instagram: And how dare you bother poor Instagram with it? That brown thing likes to look at happy pictures, thank you, with done-to-death hashtags such as #instaforlikes
and #followforfollow (ahem). What are you going to use for your cold, anyway? #SniffingForAttention?
WORKS on Twitter: Twitter is awesome if you want to boast of superior knowledge. If you’ve got the little blue birdie telling you what’s up (hee hee), you no longer need to make THIS face at
parties:
Also, when someone’s talking about global oil prices and counter-operations, you no longer have to nod bizarrely and say: “I know, right? Me too.”
DOES NOT WORK on Instagram: NO ONE, I repeat, no one’s going to go on Insta to find out about which part of the rainforest was just infested with giant rats (no offence).
DOES NOT WORK on Facebook: FB’s a little irritating, honestly – not only are they always late on the ball (like your customary party crashers), they’ll also include personal gems like “that
earthquake just shook me up!” You don’t say.
WORKS ON Instagram: You know those incredibly gorgeous photographs of all the places in the world you’ve been to, that nobody else on your list has? You know how you want to share that
experience with the world?
Instagram was created for a parallel universe. One dominated by multiple filters that can make your wart go away and your eyes look green. You can also make up new words and phrases with no
punctuation, such as #blueskiesandhappyme and #tbt (which you do not know the meaning to, but everyone’s using it, so what the hell).
DOES NOT WORK on Facebook: Facebook’s just got too much happening on a screen at a time. There will be said travel photograph. And a sidebar. And some random event invites next to it that
you don’t care a fig about. There will also be some Candy Crush requests that even Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t figured out yet how to smush.
DOES NOT WORK on Twitter: Twitter and travel quotes? Think total social annihilation. Not only is the place a veritable landmine of nastiness, you will be nursing a broken ego and a social
media phobia for months after.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)