The above image is a screen shot of a message that kept flashing up on Facebook whenever I logged in on my laptop. It didn't happen when Mandi logged in, and it didn't happen when I used Facebook on my phone so I was a little concerned but not so concerned that I fell for it. Usually when you get a helpful warning that your computer is at risk with a click here to sort this out button, it's the warning itself that is the virus and your computer is fucked. Imagine someone stopping you in the street and offering to walk you home safely before beating you up, that's what virus warnings are.
Facebook is still a predominantly computer based activity for me because on the phone you are restricted as to what you can do, and the App is terrible because it just seems to show you stuff you've already seen, it might as well be called Facebook Gold or YesterFace or something. I decided to ignore it after asking on Facebook (using my phone) if anyone had encountered similar issues and the majority told me what I already knew, that it was bullshit.
Social media began for me with the best site of them all, MySpace, which was totally computer based as mobile phones hadn't caught up. Facebook also started out when people could only use it on computers and possibly survived because it adapted. Twitter is different because it was born in the portable age and intended to be used when out and about to show people that you're out and about. In fact, in the early days of Facebook I was like a lot of people still using a computer rather than a laptop, so I sometimes find it hard to imagine people using Facebook on the move. When I see posts about television shows I picture in my head the person getting up off the sofa and walking to the computer table to write something. This is why I hardly if ever go online on Christmas Day because I think that the whole site has a day off. Of course this isn't the case and people are on hand to post pictures of their children opening presents or the Christmas dinner and of course they are doing it on the phone, yet I always imagine them leaving the festivities to go on the computer and go through the rigmarole of plugging the phone into the tower, waiting for the pictures to transfer to the computer, then uploading them to Facebook, all the time missing something that is happening that they will wish they were photographing. We had it hard back in 2007 didn't we?
I ignored the message and it eventually went away and let me use Facebook properly again.
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