Unfriend, unfollow - relatively discreet. Unbaby - the latest application of the prolific prefix of reversal - harder to explain.
Unbaby.me is a new browser extension which removes photos of babies from your Facebook feed and replaces them with pictures of anything else you fancy...cats, seals, bacon. In its first week the app had 30,000 downloads.
With this I hear the rasped breath of the social networking revolution, in death throes, having fallen on a pair of pruning shears.
It was inevitable.
Unfriending, unfollowing, trolling, flaming..we have been gradually killing off nodes in our networks with increasing fervour, because we have grown apart, or because we got bored, or by deliberately insulting eachother. With the use of preferences, likes, recommendations, pseudonyms and now content filters, we have created a world more parochial than it ever was off-line. A network of infinite possibility has been poorly nurtured and naively pruned.
Like the hop plant.
At its very best, the hop adds perfect balance to a delicious social beverage. At its worst it stings and suffocates. Suspected of creating melancholy in the time of Henry VI, growing this 'wicked and pernicious weed' was forbidden.
Gradually, 16th century British society came round to the value of the hop, a hardy perennial and social climber. Hop growers have perfected the art of cultivating this fickle friend. Deep, rich, soil, plenty of space, expect little early, plenty of manure. Each year the vines are 'dressed', that is, all the old ends are cut off, preserving the core. Aphis, red spider, fungus, are delicately wiped away with soap solution by hand.
To nurture our social network, we need to foster not stunt growth. We need to trim the lose ends, preserve the core. We need to invest, we need to give space, we need to wipe away the aphis.
We don't need to replace pictures of our friend's babies with pictures of bacon.
What we should do is create the long-needed distinction between ‘followers’ and 'friends’. When posting on a social network, tag your post to one of the components of your life - family, work, sport. Your 'followers' can chose which part to follow. Your 'friends' take the lot.
Cut away at the core, and your hop plant will die.
(Thanks to Botanical.com)
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