Shooting the Message

Facebook is the natural home for sharing images with your friends. For many years, this was mostly humorous cat and or dog pictures...

OMG IS THAT KITTEH UNDER THE DOG'S EAR OMG SO CUTE.

...but that's since expanded into a much broader range - from famous quotes all the way to parody famous quotes.

Generally I've been unable to work up enough yellow bile to justify writing about these Facebook fads.

But a recent growing trend has gotten my sphincters all uppity.


TEXT-BASED GRAPHICS FEATURING MESSAGES OF WISDOM.

Honestly, you can't go a day on Mark Zuckerberg's vampiric spawn site without being visually assaulted by these things.

At first, they were inoffensive, sweet, and life-affirming. Kind of like the Facebook version of Rebecca Gibney.

"I Believe in You!"

But the increasing volume of these macros now makes it feel like I'm stuck in Facebook traffic, only instead of cars, I'm surrounded by pithy adage trucks and common sense balloons.

I realise that the intentions behind posting such messages are all good, and kind, and well-meaning, and born out of a desire to remind ourselves that we are not alone on this spinning ball in space, that we can share and shoulder each others' burdens to create a web not just of information, but common humanity.

Perhaps then it's a demonstration of my cynicism that I ponder different reasons.

The problem is that for me, the sheer number of these images is diluting the message. It's the homeopathy of the motivational poster world.

I wonder about the text-based nature; how they came about in preference to images. Are those composing these macros eschewing distracting imagery for the simple power of language; or are they just like me and no good at Photoshop, but able to cobble together something quickly in Microsoft Word?

There's no point me calling for an end to these things; either it will continue on forever and I'll just deal with it, or the Facebook world will become bored with mere exotic fonts and go back to the cute animals.

OMG ARE THOSE KITTEHS IN MUGS NO WAY TOO CUTE LOLZ

Sorry, what was I talking about again?