The Birthday Experiment

Last year I remember coming across an article that talked about birthdays on social media, specifically Facebook. Although I don’t necessarily agree on all of its points, it inspired me to perform an experiment to see how many people would catch me using a fake birthday. But before I get into that, I wanted to share some additional motivation behind the experiment.

I’ve noticed that my opinions on birthdays have gradually changed over the years. I looked forward to them when I was younger but nowadays I’m pretty apathetic towards them. Part of it could just be me getting older, but here are some observations I had that contribute to it:

I: The way people recognize birthdays has changed over time.

Before the rise of the internet people would phone each other to send birthday wishes, and even before that people would send letters. These options still exist today, but they don’t seem to be as commonly used as they used to be. I can attribute this to the following reasons:

• They are no longer the only options available to us – Nowadays we have the internet and social media such as Facebook and Twitter to help us connect with others. Which leads me to reason #2:

• They take more time to do – You have to think about what you want to say before you pick up the phone/pen. Not only that, but sending mail can take weeks, if not months to reach its destination. Phone calls are better in this regard, but still aren’t as fast as instant messaging. The internet solves this problem by allowing the sending of a message instantly.

• You don’t have to say as much on social media – You can simply say “Happy birthday” on social media and be done with it. On the other hand, letters/phone calls are generally intended for longer conversations. Trying to apply the “fewer words approach” on these mediums can come off as awkward.

II: Birthdays are often difficult to remember.

This point is fairly self-explanatory. The more friends you have in a group, the more dates you have to remember. Naturally, people are bound to forget dates at one point. Again, social media solves this problem. Both points lead me to my third and final point:

III: Social media is convenient

Again, this is self-explanatory. The internet is so widespread and ingrained into our daily lives that it makes communicating with people easier than ever. Convenience, however, potentially comes with a price. We let Facebook send reminders about birthdays and events so that we don’t have to remember it ourselves. In doing so we forget the ability to remember. I’ve also noticed that the amount of calls/texts I get on my birthday is far outnumbered by the number of posts on my Facebook timeline.

The Theory, and the Experiment

So given this observation along with the above three points, I was fairly convinced that very few people actually knew my birthday without Facebook reminding them. I then decided to change my birthday on my profile to April 1st (April Fools’ Day) in order to see who would catch on. I was certain that someone would call me out on it since I used a date that was obviously fake, or so I thought.

When April 1st came around, I got wishes as usual, though not as many as what I normally get. However, not a single person noticed that my birthday was fake until I mentioned it to them. Some people did send me a few texts on my real birthday a few weeks prior, so they did remember after all (none of these people said anything on my timeline on the fake day).

In the end, I wasn’t particularly surprised by the results, as I was never very vocal with my birthday to begin with. However, it has made me question the value of the modern birthday greeting. In most cases I’ve stopped posting birthday greetings to people’s timelines as I didn’t feel that I was being genuine if I only talked to them once a year. Remember what I said about phone calls and letters: you have to think about what you want to say before you pick up the phone/pen. By thinking about what you’re saying, it makes the message more personal, an element that I feel is missing from the generic “Happy birthday” message that populate people’s timelines. My friends list has birthdays distributed evenly through all twelve months, and I couldn’t possibly come up with something to say for everyone in my list, since many of my friends are people from high school that I’ve fallen out of contact with.

This post may have come off as negative against social media but I don’t intend it to be that way. I’m not advocating that people ditch social media and go back to the old fashioned ways of sending birthday greetings, nor am I implying that people are lazy and don’t want to remember birthdays. All methods have their own merits, and if someone wants to wish me happy birthday regardless of whether I know them well or not, I’m not going to stop them. But the way we treat birthdays has changed, and whether or not this change is for better or for worse remains to be seen.