EVERY parent thinks their child is the best ever and many of them choose to express this belief by posting constant, unrelenting pictures of said best ever kid on Facebook to the delight of friends and family.
Or, if not delight, certainly polite silence.
One group of pals in Australia was unable to adhere to the dictum of 'if you don't like it, scroll by it' and opted for guerilla warfare instead. Jade Ruthven, of Perth, Western Australia, was delighted to receive a handwritten note in the post. Delighted until she opened it.
"I have got together with a few of the girls and we are all SO OVER your running commentary of your life and every single thing Addy does... guess what - every parent thinks their kid is the best ever." Liberally sprinkled with exclamation marks - always the sign of a reasoned mind - the letter pulls a final punch: "We can't wait for you to get back to work - maybe you won't have time to be on Facebook quite so much."
Jade, in retaliation, sent a copy to the Australian comedian Em Rusciano, who shared it with fans, and the support came flooding in for the 33-year-old dental hygienist and overeager mum.
Firstly, I imagine this letter was sent by a socially awkward, passive aggressive lone wolf pretending to have corralled a gang of chums. "Gang" is probably correct, "chums" less likely given the pathetic nature of the letter. With friends like those, etc.
There's several problems about complaining of your friends' baby photos online: the moral issues around sharing so many intimate moments of someone too young to consent (for which a golden rule should be that the picture doesn't go up unless the child can post it themselves, a skill probably achieved younger than I'd think); the malicious use of stolen photos online; and the fact that your own timeline is likely to be as boring as the British Lawnmower Museum. Let's face it, very few people have personalities big enough or wits sufficiently sparklingly to keep their Facebook timelines genuinely interesting.
It's not only hypocrisy that makes life online frustrating; some people turn out to be horribly disappointing. Those you think are extremely decent in real life but they pop in your timeline after having shared a Britain First post. The person you became friends with because they seemed level headed but their Facebook feed is a muddled smoosh of political posts showing their unremitting devotion to a party they don't really understand the principles of.
It's accepted that as you grow older you become cynical, more accepting of the fact that some people profess to believe in certain things but privately they eschew their values for the sake of comfort or ease or simply don't grasp their own hypocrisy. Facebook makes it harder to hide your special brand of doublethink. The friend who constantly complains of being skint while posting pictures of her new Mulberry bag, the mum who believes being a mum is the hardest, most exhausting job in the world while posting photographs of the many artisanal coffees and Vogue magazines she enjoys while the kids are at school. The feminist who likes Tommy Sheridan and 50 Shades of Grey.
You're not a person on social media, you're a brand. And any brand that behaves contrary to its professed values is going to, at the very minimum, irk its followers. At least a steady glut of baby photographs from a doting mum is honest. I can handle an e-friend who enthuses about their hobby or their child or their job or - at a push - their political party. Go wild, decorate my timeline with your droning enthusiasm.
But the animal lover who bets on the Grand National or the professed environmentalist who you know doesn't even recycle? Prepare for a poison pen letter, I have some words for you.
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