Do you think Mark Zuckerberg ever thought about the effect he would have on the way we celebrate our birthdays?
To be honest, I’m not sure there was any part of the present facebook reality that he would have predicted. For instance, I can’t imagine he planned on providing a space that would juxtapose my mom’s prayer requests with half naked Kristen Wiig impersonators.
But the biggest unplanned impact, in my opinion has been more subtle because it spotlights something more universal than even the urge to merge with other like-hearted souls … it’s the simple noting of the day we were born.
Yes, our birthday. The day of the year when we get so self-possessed we expect everyone to pay more attention to us than is either realistic or likely.
My birthday this year was a big one. The big 40.
I happen to be across the globe, teaching in Seoul, South Korea on my birthday. Normally it would be a bummer to not be at home on the big day … but I love it over here, and I had a few celebrations back in the states before I left. The biggest one was a party my friend Tim threw for me three whole weeks before the actual day. I especially loved the people at the party who were genuinely offended that it wasn’t yet really my birthday. I was like, there’s free booze … shut up.
The best part though, about being over here is that my birthday started a whole day before it did in the states. That meant that I was celebrating and eating rice cake (a whole other blog) well before the onslaught of birthday wishes began.
Midway through the first day of the two-day international dateline largess, the facebook messages began to appear. It was interesting to see who wrote from the states during this time because the way FB works is that your name doesn’t appear on the home page of birthdays until it’s that same calendar day. Therefore, since it was still the day before … this meant these eager beavers were actually looking on the expanded list, essentially researching the celebrants rather than simply clicking on the reminder that comes up each day.
That’s basically a long-winded way of saying Thanks for the extra effort!
By the end of my birthday in Asia it was morning in New York and the early risers began their posting.
The momentum built as I slept … crescendo-ing as the clock traveled westerly around the globe.
By the time the US west coast got to the end of the 19th of February, my FB wall was so sweetly full of blessings and wishes that I sat quietly in my little Seoul sanctuary of a bedroom and cried the happiest of cries.
And all this is thanks to Mark Zuckerberg.
I’m super sappy but I’m in no way a sap. I know full well that the vast, vast majority of genuinely caring people that sent me birthday wishes would not have known it was my birthday … much less written to me had it not been for that little reminder on their FB homepage.
But in all honesty … I don’t care. The truth is our world has no shortage of divisions and obstacles. We read all the time about how sites like Facebook are making us less social not more or how we’re getting less able to interact with each other in spite of “social networking.”
This new birthday paradigm … having a giant birthday hub … changes everything. There’s undeniably more connection; it brings people closer together that might otherwise go years without connecting. In fact, I’ll go so far to say that a quiet social revolution has occurred. The facebook birthday reminder has changed the whole way we experience our birthday.
I’ll admit that I went to my computer all day long excited to read who had posted a note. There was a feeling of anticipation that I didn’t ever have on my birthday. BFB (before facebook) I was quite content hearing from my close friends and family. But now, wow … so much fun seeing whose name would pop up on my feed.
I don’t care that it was a click and the typing of about 20 characters that came my way over and over. It was real. The quiet tears that welled up were about as organic as they come. And in my book, solitary tears have a certain freedom that other tears envy.
So thank you Mark Zuckerberg for letting my friends and their friends and the friends of their friends know it was my birthday. You’ve moved us toward how we’re truly supposed to feel on that one day.
