When Facebook Needed a Photo of Four Dirty Plates

In January 2009, I was already irritated by a Facebook ritual.

Four people go out to eat.

Everybody finishes.

Then, instead of photographing the food before eating it, they photograph the dirty plates afterward.

Later, each person is tagged on their own plate.

That was the joke.

The participants, according to my irritated younger description, considered this clever.

Original.

A little rebellious.

Perhaps evidence that their perception was unusually open.

I considered it a cliché.

Looking at the entry now, the most interesting part is not whether the joke was funny.

It is how early social media had already begun creating repeatable social rituals.

Facebook was supposed to let people share their lives.

Very quickly, people learned recognizable formats for sharing them.

Group photo.

Tagged plate.

Relationship status.

Song lyric.

Quiz result.

FarmVille request.

Photo album from one night out.

The platform did not dictate all of these rituals.

Users invented them.

Then other users copied them.

Soon a behavior that had felt spontaneous became a template.

That process is one of the central engines of online culture.

Someone does something once.

A few people imitate.

The imitation becomes recognizable.

Recognition makes it easier to copy.

Eventually nobody knows who started it.

Now it is simply something people do.

Memes work this way.

So do poses.

Photo styles.

Captions.

Challenges.

Reaction formats.

The dirty-plate photograph was a tiny early version.

Four empty plates.

Four tags.

A small in-joke transformed into social content.

I mocked it because repetition had become visible.

That is often the moment a trend becomes annoying.

The first time you see something, it may feel creative.

The tenth time, you see the template behind the creativity.

Once the template becomes visible, innocence disappears.

You stop seeing four friends having fun.

You see four friends performing a known format of having fun.

That distinction became much more important as social media matured.

People do not only have experiences.

They increasingly encounter experiences with an awareness of how those experiences can be represented.

The café is not only a café.

It has a photograph.

The holiday has a carousel.

The meal has a story.

The run has a tracking screenshot.

The concert has a video.

This does not make the experience fake.

Documentation can be part of genuine enjoyment.

Humans have always kept souvenirs and photographs.

What social media changed was the speed with which documentation became public and standardized.

You begin recognizing the expected image before the event is finished.

In the 2009 example, even the remains of the meal became content.

The plates were dirty because the event had already happened.

That gave the photograph a kind of comic authenticity.

Not:

Look what we ate.

But:

Look what remains after we ate it.

Tag yourself.

There is something wonderfully primitive about early Facebook humor.

The platform was still new enough that tagging an object as a person could itself feel playful.

A plate stands in for a friend.

Identity becomes annotation.

People were discovering what the interface could be made to do beyond its intended purpose.

That experimentation is normal in new media.

Users bend features.

A location tag becomes a joke.

A relationship status becomes performance.

A profile picture becomes protest.

A comment thread becomes a game.

Platforms offer tools.

Culture misuses them creatively.

The old entry complained that people thought they were being original.

That complaint is also part of internet culture.

Every trend creates its counter-trend:

people who participate

and people who announce that participation is embarrassing.

This is one of the oldest online status competitions.

I understood the joke before you.

I stopped liking the band before everyone else.

I used the platform before it became crowded.

I never do that cliché thing.

Mocking a cliché can itself become a cliché.

The 2009 version of me was not outside the system.

I was using Ekşi Sözlük to complain about people using Facebook in predictable ways.

That is its own predictable internet behavior.

This is what makes old online writing funny.

Everyone thinks they are observing the crowd from a safe balcony.

The balcony is also crowded.

Still, the instinct behind the criticism was useful.

Repeated formats can make individuality look strangely uniform.

Social media invites the sentence:

Express yourself.

Then provides a finite interface through which millions of people express themselves.

Of course patterns emerge.

Same buttons.

Same profile fields.

Same image ratios.

Same reactions.

Same visible metrics.

People remain different, but expression is channeled.

This became even more obvious with later platforms.

Short vertical video creates one family of behavior.

Photo feeds create another.

Character limits create another.

Stories disappearing after a day create another.

The format shapes the culture.

Facebook tagging helped create a culture of publicly mapping relationships.

Who was there?

Who is this?

Which plate belongs to whom?

Tagging made social networks visible.

The dirty-plate joke depended entirely on that feature.

Without tags, it was just a bad photograph of dishes.

With tags, each plate became a person.

Technology supplied the grammar.

Users supplied the joke.

This is why apparently trivial social-media habits are useful historical records.

They reveal what features felt new enough to play with.

Today, describing a photo-tagging joke requires historical context because the feature itself feels ordinary.

At the time, it was part of discovering online identity.

You could attach someone’s name to an image.

Then notifications spread the image through networks.

A private meal could become a small public event.

The original entry was only a complaint.

But complaints are often better cultural archives than praise.

People complain when they notice a norm forming.

“Everyone does this now.”

That sentence is historically useful.

It tells us the behavior had crossed from novelty into repetition.

January 2009.

Facebook.

Four friends.

Meal finished.

Dirty plates photographed.

Each person tagged on their plate.

That is a surprisingly complete little period piece.

The food does not matter.

The restaurant does not matter.

The people are not named.

The interface is the protagonist.

Years later, I am less annoyed by the people than interested in what they were doing.

They were inventing ordinary social media.

Not in a Silicon Valley office.

At a table after dinner.

Culture is built that way.

Features become habits through millions of tiny experiments.

Some experiments are clever.

Some annoying.

Some both.

And then one day, someone writes an entry complaining that everybody is doing the same thing.

At that point, the experiment has succeeded.