While Facebook continues to get bigger and bigger, its users are finding more and more reasons to give about it. So many in fact, that former JOE writer Emmet Purcell even went and wrote a book about it.
When one of your own flies the coop for pastures new, one thing you’re left hoping is that they won’t forget where they came from. So when former JOE staff writer Emmet Purcell needed a shameless plug for his brand new book on a recent return to Ireland from Qatar, where he now lives and works, he knew well where to look.
In all seriousness, Emmet has just published a book entitled ’99 Reasons Everyone Hates Facebook’, which pretty much does exactly what is says on the tin and is based on his and other people’s experiences of the social networking behemoth and why it isn’t beloved as it once was.
Emmet called into his old office while spending a few weeks at home recently and had a chat with JOE about what the book was all about, about how Facebook has changed over the years and why articles about aluminium can in fact be rivet-ing. * We’ll get our coats*
JOE: So Emmet, tell us what the book is about and what prompted you to write it in the first place?
Emmet Purcell: Basically I had noticed, over time, that the tide had started to turn against Facebook. Years ago, all Irish people were able to jump from one sinking ship in Bebo to Facebook, which initially gave us the exact same experience but was much better formed.
I think though, that because of the behaviour of people’s Facebook friends, the site has since become a brand extension for people and I think lots of us wish they we could leave Facebook but just can’t pull the trigger. Instead, we all find different ways to rant about it with friends.
Whenever I saw an article titled 10 reasons or 20 reasons to hate Facebook I normally found that the article was quite small but the comments section was always enormous because people always had their own experiences and their own reasons as to why they were annoyed at Facebook.
I figured that if there are so many articles with 10 or 20 reasons, coupled with the comments on each site, there must be 99, so I wanted to write the definitive book on the topic. There are books like how to be successful with your business on Facebook and books on how to use Facebook for older people but there wasn’t a single book on how people interact on Facebook and why it can be so irritating.
JOE: So was it always going to be 99 reasons or what made you arrive at that figure?
EP: It was always around 99. The idea came to me when I was getting the train home from work and I instantly thought that someone must have written a book like this before. So I did a little bit of research on Amazon and a few other sites and I couldn’t find any evidence of it. By the time I got off the train I had about 60 or 70 different reasons taken down on a notes app and then, after speaking to my friends about what annoyed them on site, I had one big master file of reasons that I would return to every time.
It took me 18 months to write the book altogether, which was a good thing because Facebook created brand new reasons to be annoying during that timeframe.
To be fair, I am guilty of at least ten of the reasons to hate Facebook as listed in the book. For example, check-in show-offs; whenever people check in on their phone they do it because they either do it six times a day and can’t stop doing it, or they just want to show off.
The only time I did it was at the Europa League Final in Dublin and I felt like a terrible person afterwards so there are people probably reading this and thinking ‘who’s this guy, thinking he’s all holier than thou?’ but I’m not really… honest.
JOE: So give us an idea of some of the type of Facebook users covered in the book?
EP: Most of the chapters were laid out and the original idea was to have nine or ten reasons for each chapter, so the ‘Attentions Seekers’ had about 15, but I just couldn’t stop so ‘Idiots’ got their own chapter too. When I say idiot, I mean the type of person who would join a group called ‘Like if you like your own daughter’. That is an actual group with 1.4 million likes, which is a figure greater than the population of Estonia. Craziness.
There were a lot of examples I could’ve used as standalone reasons but I didn’t just want to compartmentalise each reason into small details. For example, poor grammar is a huge problem for many and I could have done a whole chapter on it but I just wanted to keep it to one reason, have a giant rant and then move on.
Hopefully when people read the book they’ll say “I know what he’s talking about” or hopefully they’ll have found new things to be annoyed at.
JOE: Did you have to scale down the problems to 99 at the end of it all?
EP: Actually, sometimes Facebook fixed the things I complained about, which was really irritating! Previously you couldn’t edit your posts, for example if you had an argument and made a spelling mistake you couldn’t change it but now you have a small window of opportunity to do that.
But I found in the majority of cases it was better just to wait it out because Facebook tended to create brand new reasons to hate it, such as paying to promote your own posts.
I think I described that addition to Facebook as ‘Before you could pay to promote your own posts there were arguments as to what was the most pathetic thing on Facebook and at least now the matter has finally been settled’, but ever since I finished the book they’ve come up with new features I never got to mention, such as an upcoming feature where you’ll have to pay to message celebrities.
To be honest, I could have waited forever and had all these brand new reasons but eventually I had to draw a line and say “It’s ready, it’s ready”.
JOE: You obviously had to put in a lot of research, so do you hate Facebook now?
EP: It’s not necessarily that I hate Facebook and I was very careful that any mention of Mark Zuckerberg was glowing and referenced his pecs and his beautiful hair; I’m trying really hard not to get sued here!
It’s not really about the site itself because if people want to read a book about privacy concerns it’s not going to be entertaining. I wanted to talk about how Facebook has changed the way people interact with each other and how they represent themselves online.
Facebook originally was a place you could chat to your friends and now it’s a place you can spread your own brand to various different people; it’s a strange little world where everyone sees themselves as their own little celebrity and believes that you must know what they’re doing at all times. It’s a really strange world that we live in; it’s unrecognisable from where we were five years ago.
When you were a kid and you took a photo, the photos were precious because you only had a certain amount of rolls of film and you’d have to wait two weeks to see the results whereas now, people are taking photos of their food, making it look timeless on Instagram and then using services like Foursquare to show you where they ate their food too.
I wanted to be the person to step back and just say: “What the f*ck is going on and why are you showing me this?”
JOE: We can’t resist the opportunity to get a little plug in here, so how much of an influence did writing for JOE have on the book and what does the future hold for Emmet Purcell?
EP: Well I think in terms of being at JOE, what I always enjoyed was that you were encouraged to put your own spin on things; there’s a straight story and there’s a JOE story and I always wanted to, as much as I could, put in my own experiences or some of the more outlandish examples I could find from around the world for each reason. The JOE writing style and JOE voice definitely carried over to a book like this.
At the moment I’m living in Qatar and writing for the magazine and newspaper of Qatar Foundation. It can be quite dry copy at times; you get to write about the likes of breakthroughs in the aluminium industry, for example! So, in a way, this is my way to loosen up at the end of a long day and I think readers of JOE will be able to recognise this style of writing and appreciate it.
In terms of the future, I’ll just keep those aluminium articles rolling, I guess!
JOE: Thanks a million Emmet and as that annoying character in Father Ted once said ‘Good luck with the book’.
EP: Cheers.
For more information on the book, including how to order it online, check out Emmet’s website and you can also follow him on Twitter
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