Four Dirty Plates

Dinner was over, and four dirty plates remained on the table. Under normal circumstances, this would have been the least interesting moment of the evening. Instead, someone took out a phone and told everyone not to move anything.

A photograph was taken. Then each plate was tagged with the name of the person who had eaten from it. Four friends disappeared from the picture and were replaced by four dirty plates.

The first time I saw this idea, I understood the joke. The fifth time, it had already become a ritual. Four people ate, four plates remained, someone took a photograph, and everyone was tagged.

What amused me was how quickly something that looked original became a template. People were still discovering what Facebook could do, and almost every new feature became material for a small social experiment. Tags, relationship updates, quizzes, strange profile photos, and giant albums from one night out all became part of the new language.

At another meal, I watched the table after everyone had finished. Nobody reached for a camera, and I felt unnecessarily pleased. Then someone said, “We should take a picture of the plates.”

Of course.

The plates were arranged, photographed, and later uploaded. When I opened Facebook that night, I saw the image and discovered that my plate had been tagged correctly.

I had become a dirty dish on the internet.

For a moment, I wanted to complain. Then I noticed the obvious problem: I had been there, I had waited while the photograph was taken, and I had done nothing to stop it. I was part of the ritual I was mocking.

That was probably the most accurate lesson of early social media. Everyone thought they were watching everyone else from a safe distance, but nobody was really outside the system. The people posting were part of it, and the people complaining were part of it too.

Years later, I cannot remember what we ate or where the meal happened. I barely remember why the evening deserved a photograph. What I remember clearly are the plates.

Four dirty plates, four names, and a complete group photo without a single face in it.

For early Facebook, that somehow made perfect sense.