This picture would be a bit sexier if I'd brought the washing in first.

Just imagine if your first ever avatar depicted you covered in soil pretending to be a carrot, with no makeup, drinking a dangerous alcoholic concoction, being soaked with a bucket of iced water, practically every Facebook ridiculousness in one photo would ensure that you won the Internet and would probably be put in charge.

I’ve never really been a fan of Facebook and the element of playground silliness that goes with it; no sheep has ever been thrown on my watch and nobody neck-nominated me. I did do what is in my opinion the best take on the ice-bucket challenge, and thanks to a nomination from a friend I recently posted my first ever profile picture.

I’m not sure why everyone is doing this all of a sudden; unlike the ice-bucket challenge or any of the breast cancer awareness posts (bra colour one year, ‘I’m flying to Tenerife’ another year – I’m disappointed that ‘no bra day’ didn’t catch on last year) there doesn’t seem to be any charitable reason behind it. This concept might have made sense last year when Facebook celebrated its tenth anniversary. There’s a certain era of people whose first avatars were actually from their long abandoned (or in my case deleted) MySpace account, which was the case for the above offering of mine. The photograph actually began its life as my Friends Reunited profile before I was on MySpace and it was then used when I joined Facebook (reluctantly) in 2007. As I explained on Facebook, the reason I kept the same picture for so long is because in the pre-selfie early days of digital photography, uploading photographs from a phone camera in 2007 was a bellyache of a task that sometimes took weeks.

Another thing from the olden days of the Internet that youngsters won’t be able to get their heads around is that in the olden days of social media (way back when it was called social networking) there was no Internet access on mobile phones so all of our thanking for the add and sheep throwing was all done while sitting at an actual computer. When Facebook’s wheels started in motion back in 2007 it was all computers based, but Facebook was a very different animal back then. MySpace had its moment in the sun before Internet portability so very few people operated their accounts by phone, in fact I doubt that very many people MySpaced on the move. The migration from MySpace to Facebook was one of those things that people didn’t quite want to commit to, and to this day I can’t understand why MySpace lost popularity so rapidly when it was far better at the time. I refer of course to the time of the 1.0 and 2.0 profile layouts and not the mess that it is now.

My thoughts have turned to those olden days thanks to this current sharing of our first profile pictures, and it occurred to me that there will be people using Facebook that never had a MySpace account. There’s a generation gap that nobody has pointed out before, even weirder was the experience I once had when someone younger than me didn’t know about throwing sheep at people.

It’s as if we were using a steam powered version of the Internet.

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This week’s edition of The Sunday Alternative is here.