India Doyle: start a revolution

I tried to start a revolution. I think almost three weeks of consistently looking at vomit covered carpets has made me a bit rowdy and I thought that it would be fucking hilarious if everyone shut down their Facebooks the day that it went public on the stock exchange. I still think it would be really funny. It would also have been an enormous ‘fuck you’ to the people who are going to make billions out of us, the everyday person, who will supposedly go on liking and posting on walls until the end of time.

The revolution, I’ll admit, was sort of like Napoleon’s voyage into Russia (for those of you who take science, it was ill planned and extremely ambitious). It began last night as I started hashtagging ‘Facebook Revolution’ over and over again. I briefly put it as my status and then realised that Zuckerberg would probably hunt me down. I sat, waiting for it to be retweeted. One friend did – a sympathy retweet – I thought it was the beginning of a viral movement, it wasn’t.

This morning I eagerly checked my saintly mail, expecting to have 1000 new messages saying ‘Barbara from Ohio has retweeted you’ and ‘Sam from Lisbon has replied to your tweet’. There was nothing. What is wrong with the world? I mean if Jamie Ross can get 500 likes for ripping the shit out of a something why can’t I get 5 people to retweet my Facebook revolution? The BBC had nothing on my revolution plan either, it was kind of devastating.

What my failure to induce a cultural movement indicated was that people won’t act until the majority do. Can we not live without Facebook? Have we forgotten how to form friendships that aren’t based on liking each other’s profile pictures? Or does no one even care? Surely it would be more fun to piss off a lot of old men than to refresh, refresh, refresh… Evidently not.

At least I tried I suppose, and no doubt the attempt will cripple my prospect of ever getting a job when my entire Facebook file is pulled up and they look at me and think a) ‘jesus she was fat in 2007’ and b) she’s clearly mentally unstable, don’t hire her.

In other news, it’s the end of the semester. This year’s been a good ‘un: from the launch of The Stand, to the decapitation of the pigeon, to Louise Richardson’s very fashionable debut on the New York stock exchange and all the KKC, KKF (which combined makes KFC, the introduction of which would have been a much simpler solution to that entire rumpus). We really have confirmed that the students of St Andrews are ‘ever to excel’.

A lot of great people are leaving, bye, you’ll be missed. Meanwhile St Andrews will continue ever to be, ever to exist, ever to be home of questionable documentaries, ever to inspire, ever to make you aware of your history, ever to force us to remember… a bit like Facebook really.