It’s weird to see Facebook – once as omnipresent and seemingly indestructible as concrete or Coldplay – reduced to touting for custom on television, a medium it had presumably hoped to kill off by now. Weirder still, its first-ever series of TV ads seeks to remind us what friendship used to mean in those days before Facebook came along and turned everyone’s social life into a big online pissing contest.
As the obligatory twee folk version of a classic pop hit twinkles irritatingly in the background, a pair of elderly bros take a selfie by a lake and gaggles of impossibly cute girls run through rainy streets or jive in unison to Willie Nelson LPs. “They make us heroes in their stories, so we let their likes become our likes,” squeaks the equally twee voiceover, as if explaining the concept of friendship to a psychopathic alien (or indeed someone who’s spent too long on social media).
Facebook knows that it’s corrupted a generation, that in real life you’d never get three people dancing in a kitchen without one of them uploading a video of it and neurotically checking for “likes”. So it’s pleading with us for a fresh start, a chance to prove that it really is a place to make best friends for ever, rather than a seedy information exchange where we surrender our own privacy for the chance to snoop on our exes.
Well, too late Zuckerberg. Friendship is already dead: I just asked my 354 “friends” if anyone wanted to come round and dance around to Willie Nelson LPs in my kitchen and nobody even bothered to reply.
