From an online sideshow to an overcrowded stage

And I definitely should have taken action when the home-made beer-battered cod and chips made an appearance.

I’m talking pictures. Pictures of food. Pictures of food posted onto the social networking site Facebook by an old university friend who has developed the curious and breathtakingly irritating habit of photographing her culinary achievements and uploading them onto her page.

It is a phenomenon that will be familiar to many Facebook users, and, sadly, it’s not confined to food.

The average Facebook homepage (a page which displays all the recent pictures and updates posted by your friends) usually comprises, in no particular order, images of: babies, parties, holidays, scenes from the commute to work, more holidays, pints of beer/glasses of wine and more holidays.

And so it was that last Thursday I cut my food friend loose and jettisoned her off into the social media-sphere in an act known as ‘unfriending’.

It is perhaps a sign of the popularity of the term – which essentially means deleting someone from your friends list – that in 2009 it was accepted as a recognised word by the Oxford English Dictionary.

Unfriending is undoubtedly on the increase, and it begs the question: is social media losing its appeal?

The answer, according to a recent poll by the Reuters news agency, is a resounding ‘yes’.

One-third of those surveyed said they were now ‘bored’ with Facebook. The study also revealed that users were becoming more passive, preferring to quickly browse the uploads of a small but highly active minority than join in the action themselves.

And that is me. And it is probably you too. Of the 126 ‘friends’ I have on Facebook, fewer than 15 are responsible for 90 per cent of the uploads.

But it is not that I don’t use or appreciate Facebook.

Social media sites have become invaluable assets to so many people in so many professions.

Journalists use them daily to source news and information and break stories. Businesses use them as a free source of promotion and advertising. Many of our States Members, most noticeably Treasury Minister Philip Ozouf, give a running commentary on political life in 140 characters. And only last week David Bowie used Twitter to announce he was releasing his long-awaited comeback single.

Indeed, social media has become such a pervasive force that an increasing number of employers, and some psychologists, believe that people who aren’t on Facebook are suspicious.

Last year, American business magazine Forbes reported that human resources departments were becoming wary of applicants who did not have a Facebook account.

And German magazine Der Taggspiegel went further, pointing out that Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, and James Holmes, who is accused of killing 12 people and wounding 58 others in the Colorado cinema shooting last year, were both suspiciously absent from the world’s biggest social networking site.

But while Facebook membership remains strong, its value to users is on the wane because all too often the real news and information – the stuff you signed up to Facebook and Twitter for – is left gasping for air under the pile of clutter dumped into social media land by people who have convinced themselves that every single little aspect of their life is worth documenting.

It seems that social media, while offering an invaluable outlet for news and information, has opened the door for, and given a voice to, a whole swathe of the population who, it seems, have spent their lives hoping that one day there will be a way to let the world know what they are doing.

In essence, social media has shifted – largely it seems within the last couple of years – from an online sideshow to real life where friends occasionally kept you informed about genuinely interesting developments, to an overcrowded stage where everyone seems to be competing to be the main event.

And that is solely why it is losing its appeal. I suppose nowadays I just see it like an old friend I’ve lost touch with. A friend I try not to see too often and only engage with when everyone else is busy.

BUT the proliferation of the banal is not the only recent development in the land of social media.

Looking back over the last 12 months, it seems that 2012 will be remembered as the year that social media turned nasty – a year where hordes of so-called trolls took to their keyboards without fear of causing an upset or falling the wrong side of the law.

Take, for example, the nine Twitter users who were fined after revealing the identity of the woman raped by former Sheffield United and Wales footballer Ched Evans. Or the case of 21-year-old university student Liam Stacey who was jailed for 56 days for posting racially offensive remarks on Twitter about Fabrice Muamba just minutes after the footballer collapsed on the pitch with cardiac arrest.

Indeed, the dramatic rise in allegations of abuse on social media, which has seen the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service deal with 60 complaints in the last 18 months, recently forced its director, Keir Starmer, to issue new advice on what constitutes an offence.

And the outcome was that those who post grossly offensive remarks online will be less likely to be prosecuted if they delete the messages quickly, particularly if they were drunk at the time they made them.

It was a strange and perhaps unexpected new direction in policy that will probably only encourage more of the same.

With the rise in online abuse mixed with the proliferation of tedious postings, perhaps even more people will have made it their New Year’s resolution to moderate their social media-ing, take up a sport or hobby, or use the time to perfect their cooking skills.