A Brief History of My Social Media Use Part 1: The Halcyon Days

The Friendster to MySpace to Facebook pipeline, and my first glimpses into the dark side of social media.

I’m doing something new! In light of my social media detox this month (progress not perfection is my motto!), I’m taking it back to the very beginning and reflecting on my history with social media — how and when I started using it, and when it stopped being fun — in this new SERIES (!!) called “A Brief History of My Social Media Use.” My initial installment in this newsletter is FREE and not paywalled so it’s open for everyone to view. If you’d like to read subsequent installments, become a paid subscriber here.

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Photo by Anna Nekrashevich on Pexels

In the Beginning, There Was Friendster

In December 2005, I met an old friend from acting school for coffee at a cozy cafe on a snowy corner in my Brooklyn neighborhood. I was 30 years old and fresh off a breakup — what would turn out to be the most devastating breakup of my life — and this friend had someone she wanted to set me up with.

“I’m friends with him on Friendster,” she told me, leaning closer over the table. “So you can become friends with me and then you’ll be able to see his pictures through my profile.”

So I joined Friendster so I could take a peek at my blind date before meeting him, and that was my entrée into social media. He must’ve been cute because I agreed to the date, but it didn’t work out between us and I went back to a few more years of on-again-off-again chaos with the ex who’d recently dumped with me — we’ll call him Eli* to protect his identity.

A year later, the interest in Friendster among people my age morphed into fascination with MySpace, another site where I could surreptitiously look up crushes.

And then in the fall of 2007, Facebook came on the scene and took hold, and everything that came before it faded into oblivion.

The Rise of Facebook, Back When It Was Fun

In the fall of 2007, I started working at the Time Inc. website Health.com in preparation for a big site relaunch, as the Office Manager and Executive Assistant to both the heads of business and editorial. One day, a consultant (who turned out to be crazy so perhaps I shouldn’t have heeded her advice so readily, but that’s another story) came in for a meeting with my business-side boss, and told me about a new sensation called Facebook that I had to join.

I worked in the new, burgeoning digital media world and I took this responsibility seriously, so I immediately jumped on this trend, set up my Facebook profile, and became an early adopter (for someone who wasn’t a millennial and introduced to Facebook in college). I convinced friends and family members to join and enthusiastically proselytized about the benefits of this new innovation to my coworkers.

About six months later, my ex Eli joined Facebook. We lived in the same neighborhood and worked at the same company in the same building, and every time I ran into him we’d reignite our relationship before it inevitably flamed out again in a crush of pain.

I’d recently run into Eli in the lobby at work as I was juggling a stack of pizza boxes to bring upstairs for a staff lunch. We passed each other by the elevator bank, said hi, and then soon after, quickly resumed contact.

Eli sent me a friend request on Facebook and as much as I loved him — and I loved him so much it hurt, and often — I ignored it. In a rare moment of wisdom and clarity, I knew that being connected to him on social media would be bad for me. He kept sending me emails, prodding me to accept his request, and I dodged them and made excuses until our brief reunion was over and our relationship ended, this time for good. When it came to Eli, not accepting his Facebook friend request was the smartest decision I ever made.

Back to the Fall of 2007

A new Audience Development Lead had recently been hired onto our team at Health.com, and he was just as interested as I was in this new fangled social media. He came over to us at Time Inc. from his previous job at Condé Nast, a very impressive place to work, and even taught a continuing education course at NYU about audience development. His professorial experience is what gave me the idea that I pitched to my business-side boss, and my boss loved it so we did it. I proposed that I collaborate with the new Audience Development Lead (we’ll call him Ray*) to develop social media training for our staff.

My training concept became “Social Media Idol,” based on, of course, the hugely popular show American Idol. “Social Media Idol” was a monthly, staff-wide meeting. Each month, Ray and I would select one new social media platform to focus on, like Facebook or StumbleUpon (bonus points for anyone who remembers that one!!). We’d give an overview and explain how it worked, and then assign a challenge to the staff for the following month — such as coming up with an idea for a Facebook app.

At the next monthly meeting, people who wanted to participate in the challenge would present their idea to the three judges: Simon (Judy*, Health.com’s Executive Producer), Randy (Ray, the Audience Development Lead), and Paula (me!). We’d give feedback in the style of our namesake judge and then choose a winner. I picked the prizes for the winners and they were really good and worth a lot of money, because this was back when the publishing industry was still doing fairly well and publishing companies had decent budgets.

Some innovative things that I got to work on implementing came out of “Social Media Idol,” like a Facebook app featured on Health.com’s Facebook page called “Send Good Health,” that you could send to your friends to get them to follow Health.com’s account, and a “Like-gate,” which used to be a tool that was often used by websites and brands on social media — it forced you to “Like/Follow” the site’s/brand’s social media page in order to see any of its content.

I was enjoying these projects so much that in the summer of 2008 I had an idea — my company could create a job for me and I would solely work on Health.com’s social media! I even remember writing about this flash of inspiration in my journal at Starbucks on my lunch break, and walking back to work with a spring in my step, so excited to have stumbled upon an idea for a job that lit me up. NO positions like this existed at the time, and I was excited to have thought of it.

But in general, by that point, I was feeling pretty downtrodden from being an Executive Assistant. I proactively created my own projects, like “Social Media Idol,” to make work interesting, but most of my time was spent serving the boring, tedious, demoralizing administrative needs of my bosses. So either I mentioned my idea to my boss and wasn’t encouraged, or I discouraged myself in advance and never even tried.

Two years later, social media jobs exploded onto the scene.

Twitter Begins — and With It, My First Glimpses Into the Dark Side of Social Media

I was still Health.com when Twitter started becoming popular. The first way I remember it being used was as an app on Facebook. In the beginning, it would say, “Jennifer is twittering…” followed by the actual text of what you were writing (or “twittering”). And then, of course, “twittering” became “tweeting.”

In 2009, I created an account on Twitter, and I quickly grew a decent-sized following. Twitter was a paradise of people who liked the same things as me — writing, coffee, yoga, and music — and I found lots of new “Twitter friends” with whom I was in frequent contact, tweeting back and forth all day long. I spent a lot of time on Twitter daily, and even started to think in 140-character tweets.

It seemed like a dream… until I started to see the dark side of social media.

The first problem started when I ran into Eli next to a barrel of nectarines at my local grocery store in the summer of 2009 and we got into contact again — but not romantically this time, because now he had a girlfriend and he lived with her. We went for drinks one night after work, to the same dive bar we’d first had drinks together over four years earlier when we’d just met — he was the one to pick this nostalgic location, and I was quick to assign meaning to his venue decision.

As we sat at “our” table in the back sipping Rolling Rock on tap from frosty pint glasses, he (irresponsibly) said to me, “I feel like I’m in an oasis when I’m with you and I never want to leave. I’ll always have feelings for you.”

But then, giving me emotional whiplash, he uttered: “I want to try to make it work with my girlfriend. Please don’t wait for me to get my shit together.”

WHAT?!? I couldn’t decipher what he said, and I tumbled into a deep depression for years and years, unable to get over him.

He’ll always have feelings for me. He wants to make it work with his girlfriend. He never wants to leave me. “Please don’t wait for me to get my shit together.”

This implied that perhaps… there was a point when he’d get his shit together and be ready to date me again and maybe I should wait.

I latched onto “I’ll always have feelings for you” and “I never want to leave you” and missed the real message: He had a girlfriend and they were staying together.

Less than a year later, they were married and had a baby. I’d accepted a buyout during a round of company layoffs so I could focus on my writing, but in reality I was unemployed and addicted to scrolling on my ex’s Twitter feed for hours a day, trying to hear his voice again in the stream of 140-character tweets, trying so hard to hold onto him, long after he was gone.

To be continued…

Become a paid subscriber to read the next installment next week!

*Names have been changed.

🌐 Around the World (Wide Web)

Welcome to this new section I’m going to be including from time to time — a roundup of what I’m doing *outside* of this newsletter and where else in the world my writing and appearances can be found.

I’ve been busy for World Cancer Day this week!

• I was on the local news station earlier this week for World Cancer Day, raising awareness about gynecologic cancers and discussing my collaboration with a leading pharmaceutical company’s global gynecologic cancer initiative. Watch the segment here (and yes, I’m available for autographs 😉).

• I was featured in “iCARE: The Cancer Anthology” in the Substack newsletter and caregiver resource Carer Mentor by Victoria Chin. Read it here, and thank you to Victoria for including me in this resource!