What’s Behind the Ridiculous Facebook Posts About “How We Were”
Some call it “the boomer social network” and perhaps they are not entirely wrong. Facebook has long since chosen to change its algorithm, rewarding the frivolous. Between reels of improvised creators and movie scenes, in recent months the “how we were” has been all the rage on the platform: hundreds of posts with photos from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s that seek to recall “the good times that will never return”, all to the detriment of news and quality content, which are now systematically hidden. The problem is that those posts are full of false information and show a dream country that in reality never existed.
News increasingly obscured, politics “banned”
The “editorial choice” of Mark Zuckerberg’s company is confirmed by the fact that in Italy there is no longer a contact person for the media sector (editors and journalists); the person in charge until a few months ago has been removed and no one has replaced her. There are many reasons for this brutalization: pure entertainment and nostalgia are certainly less problematic topics, which are very lively without exposing Meta to too many controversies with the control bodies. The final blow to the spread of news and content on social and political issues was Covid and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, due to the massive sharing of fake news that forced the platforms to invest heavily in controls. And online everything that requires human intervention – and therefore salaries to be paid – is seen as the plague. Politics has also been practically banned (on Instagram, to see the posts that talk about it you even have to go to the settings and remove a flag…), just compare the numbers on the leaders’ profiles with those of a couple of years ago. The issue was recently the subject of a complaint to Agcom signed by 43 parliamentarians from all political parties and 5 journalists (including myself) in which it was highlighted how the initiative of the American company represents a “serious danger” for the correct functioning of the democratic system.
It goes without saying that the most popular content on a social network like Facebook, notoriously frequented by a more mature audience, is that which takes us back to the past, encouraging a mass of users to “react” and above all to “share” with the same spirit with which heated discussions are held in senior centers in Tagliacozzo or in taverns throughout the country. In many cases, these are people who are unable to read the present and seek security by looking at what has been, in others, the “like” is simply motivated by nostalgia (they see themselves in those shots), in the most serious cases, there is contempt for the new generations, considered less productive and lacking in values. The same politics, hidden by the algorithm, resurfaces in other forms, through the denial of pollution and climate change, especially when cars from the past are exalted, those that “with 5 thousand lire of diesel took you to the sea”.
Nostalgic Posts That Are Popular on Facebook
And so we find the “blue social” inundated with horrifying posts, full of misleading messages and false or partial information. Women sunbathing, presumably in the mid-80s, “when there were no cell phones, cosmetic retouching and TikTok”, happy families riding around in fours on a Vespa “Other times” (and thank goodness…); and again: “We who… the large families of the past, one eats, everyone eats”; “When you drove your car straight to the beach… times that will never return (and little hands clapping). The theme “old-fashioned vacations” inspires the most shared post in recent months, present on dozens of pages accompanied by photos from family albums, because evidently Facebook knows well that fewer and fewer Italians can afford to go on vacation and those who can only take a couple of weeks off at most.
And then let’s make way for the artificial memory: “Once upon a time – we read in the post that rightly begins with the words of a fairy tale – there was a summer vacation that lasted two to three months. It had an obsolete and disused name, ‘la villeggiatura’. Many even left at the beginning of June or early July and returned in mid-September. The highway was a row of Fiat 850, 600, 1100, 127, 500 and 128, Beetles and Prinz. No one cared at all who had a BMW, Mercedes or Audi, because status symbols didn’t exist back then. Everything was simpler and more real”. The text continues with a quantity of inaccuracies, idiocies and clichés that would make Matteo Salvini’s social media managers pale, from the “cleanest sea” to Italy being the “third world power” (at most we were the fifth for a couple of years, from 1990 to 1991, due to a depreciation of the pound). The thesis is that today’s society sucks, that it is only appearance and that “they”, with their old polluting cars, when they were young were better than those who came later and above all were lucky enough to live in unrepeatable times. In short, a mood regulator with a touch of LSD in the form of posts on Facebook.
Why it’s wrong to make comparisons
In reality, defining some times as “better” than others is very stupid and risks running into counter narratives that can cause disturbances. Italy in those years was “the Africa of Europe”, a poor country, with skyrocketing inflation and with many families living in dramatic hygienic and sanitary conditions. Very few people took the mythological “holiday” of three or four months; life expectancy in 1960 was 69.8 years, today it is 81.5 years: before 1971 there were no CAT scans and not many mandatory vaccines, on the other hand there was polio and a very high infant mortality rate. Colonies of lice lived on children’s heads, we were surrounded by asbestos and industrial waste that poisoned us just a stone’s throw from our homes. The historic centers of cities like Naples, Bari and Palermo were off limits because they were controlled by the mafia, with people being gunned down during the day in the middle of the street. And then the Years of Lead, the State massacres, the most corrupt political class in history. In 1972, with far fewer vehicles in circulation, the deaths on the roads were more than 11 thousand (the beautiful cars of the past and the families of four on a Vespa…), in 2023 just over 3 thousand. Today’s young people live in the exaltation of appearance and status symbols, but many of their grandmothers wore useless furs. And in any case, parking your car on the beach was not nice, it was uncivilized.
