2. Birthday Notifications in a Pre-Facebook World

If you are a user of Facebook, then you will be mighty familiar with the birthday notifications that pop up when you log in, reminding you that today is the birthday of a family member, friend or acquaintance and that you might want to write ‘happy birthday’ on their wall. While these notifications prompt users to take relational actions by reminding them of their social obligations, a study by Viswanath et al. (2009) found that over 54% of interactions among users who interacted infrequently were in response to a birthday prompt by Facebook. This has led many scholars to argue that these reminders are turning birthday greetings into a cliché act devoid of positive facework because they diminish the significance of remembering somebody’s birthday, which is an act of friendship (West and Trester, 2013). However, these issues and concerns are not a product of the modern era. Our Victorian and Edwardian ancestors faced similar challenges, as manifested through the birthday book.

The birthday book was a Victorian invention, which came about in the 1860s as a result of popular interest in graphology and a burgeoning culture of celebrity. The book had blank pages with dates as prompts, which allowed owners to record the birthdays of loved ones, alongside quotes from famous poets, Shakespeare or the Bible. Seen as a status symbol for the increasingly literate population, the birthday book was an immediate hit amongst middle-class young men and women, as well as working-class ‘new readers’ who aspired to pure and elevated taste. As the birthday book grew in popularity, publishers developed multiple formats to suit a range of budgets: from octodecimos with embossed cloth and gilt edges (1s 6d) to morocco-bound octavos with ivory rims and clasp (21s). By 1899, over 270 types of birthday book had been published.

In the context of Facebook, Bucher (2013) sees birthday notifications as acts of “programmed sociality” because they oblige users to respond to a cue in order to maintain and cultivate friendships. However, the birthday book operated in a similar way. Being pocket-sized, owners typically carried their birthday books around with them, so just like a mobile phone notification, they would be constantly reminded when a particular birthday was taking place. In a world before telephones and internet, the owner would then either pay a visit to the person or, by the Edwardian era, use the new technology of the postcard to drop him/her a birthday message. Post was delivered up to eight times a day at this time, so even if an owner did not realise until 3:00pm that it was their sister’s birthday today, say, they could send a quick postcard and it was guaranteed to be with her within a couple of hours!

Despite being an older technology, in many ways, the birthday book had greater affordances than the Facebook birthday notification. First, the practice required the owner’s family, friends and acquaintances to inscribe their own name and birthday in the book, thereby making the process of remembering far more intimate as it was heavily entwined in the physical maintenance of an interpersonal relationship that required time and effort. Such was its importance to social exchanges that it was considered a huge faux pas not to write in the book. This is evidenced by a 1916 letter from poet Ivor Gurney to a friend in which he boldly states, “The birthday book of my beloved William [Wordsworth] is charming […] But why have you not written in the book? Where are your birthdays?”

Furthermore, handwriting itself has a performative quality, which evokes the writer even when they are not present. Plakins Thornton (1996, p. 10) describes handwriting as a “speaking picture” that embodies, regulates and generates notions of self. These features, again, made the act of remembering much more individualised and led birthday book owners to feel far more invested in wishing happy birthday because the family member or friend had personally inscribed in their book. Nowadays, Facebook users might give friends the ‘benefit of the doubt’ when it comes to not wishing happy birthday, in case they had not been online that day, but the central presence of the birthday book in many Victorian and Edwardian people’s lives meant that to forget was considered a major social error.

We must also remember that codes of conduct in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also deemed it outrageous not to wish somebody happy birthday, which would have led many book owners to go out of their way to follow through on the birthday book’s prompt. Etiquette books of the time, such as Maude C. Cooke’s 1896 Social Life, advised that on somebody’s birthday, “letters of congratulation should be sent immediately upon the occurrence of the fortunate event […] they should be brief, gracefully worded and contain no mention of other matter” (p. 457). This makes it clear that not only were users expected to respond promptly to birthday reminders, but also that they had to make the birthday wish the only focus of their message out of respect for the person. This social etiquette plays out in a slightly different way on Facebook, yet nonetheless carries over some historical traditions: interviews with modern-day users reveals that most feel it is socially unacceptable to just post a message on the wall of a close family member or friend and that this should not replace an actual phone call or text, which is far more personal (Bryant and Marmo, 2009).

While the Facebook birthday notification is a uniform process that allows very little freedom on the part of the recipient, the birthday book allowed far greater possibilities of customisation. Although its primary purpose was to remember birthdays, most owners added dates of wedding anniversaries, deaths, new houses and new jobs to their books. This was in line with guidance from etiquette books which emphasised that, apart from birthdays, “the occasions in life that call forth missives are engagements, marriages, anniversaries, business successes, etc.” (Cooke, 1896, p. 457). Owners even added national and global events of importance to their books, from Queen Victoria’s death and King Edward VII’s coronation to the outbreak of the Boer War and the end of the First World War. These served similar functions to Facebook ‘Memories’ which enable users to relive a past experience and “tour the picturesque ruins” of their former self (Birkerts, 1998, p. 342).

The birthday book was also able to offer a more multi-layered experience than the Facebook birthday notification, as it was often passed down to one of the owner’s siblings or children once they passed away. This new owner would subsequently add to the book with names of their own acquaintances, leaving the previous names intact, which turned the book into a rich biographical mosaic of the family’s social lives. Indeed, the abundant information provided in these books makes it possible to reconstruct owners’ social networks with relative ease, as indeed I have done in the past. If you are interested in reading more on this topic, check out the ‘Further Reading’ list at the end of this post.

Comparing both contemporary and modern practices surrounding birthday reminders also made me think about the fact that more face work was perhaps required in the Victorian and Edwardian eras surrounding practices of ‘unfriending’. On Facebook, if we no longer want to be friends with someone, we simply click a button and unfriend them. This is a relatively non-face threatening act, as the person receives no notification that this has occurred and may be none the wiser. However, in the birthday book, unfriending left a physical trace because the owner had to cross through the person’s name or remove the page, thereby leaving tearlines. Furthermore, with real-life social circles being far smaller and less geographically mobile in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, there was a very real chance of the two people encountering each other socially or even of the ‘unfriended’ person becoming aware of their removal from the birthday book.

While I have reflected on some of the ways that birthday reminders were, in fact, more complex in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one way in which they were relatively similar to Facebook is in their use as memorials to deceased family members or friends. In her study of dealing with grief on Facebook, Pennington (2013) found that users deliberately chose not to delete friends if they had passed away. Many said that they liked receiving a yearly reminder on the deceased’s birthday because it prompted them to think about the person, visit his/her page to leave a message and, in doing so, renegotiate and understand their bond. Equally, Edwardian birthday book owners did not delete names once a family member or friend had died, suggesting that they left their name inscribed for similar reasons. This is attested to by messages added alongside the name in some copies (“I still miss you, dear sweet mother”) or tallies showing how many years have passed since the death. These practices show that people have always dealt with grief in similar ways, perhaps being the one thing that we all have no control over and cannot change.

Framing Facebook birthday notifications in this historical backdrop reveals a continuity between past and present practices of remembering events, constructing and maintaining interpersonal relationships and managing face needs. However, it also uncovers that, despite being a simpler technology, the birthday book had many capabilities unavailable to users of social media and, in many ways, offered richer opportunities for customisation, personalisation, co-creation and the rituals of friendship. These are themes that I will pick up time and time again throughout this blog series.

References:

Birkerts, S. 1998. Some Thoughts on Rereading, In: Galef, D. ed. Second Thoughts: A Focus on Rereading, Wayne State University Press, pp. 340-44.

Bryant, E. and Marmo, J. 2009. Relational Maintenance Strategies on Facebook, Kentucky Journal Of Communication, 28(2), 129-50.

Bucher, T, 2013. The friendship assemblage: Investigating programmed sociality on Facebook, Television & New Media, 14(6), pp. 479-93.

Cooke, M. 1896. Social Life: Or, the Manners and Customs of Polite Society, The Matthews-Northrup Co.

Pennington, N. 2013. You Don't De-Friend the Dead: An Analysis of Grief Communication by College Students Through Facebook Profiles, Death Studies, 37(7), pp. 617-35.

Plakins Thornton, T. 1996. Handwriting in America: A Cultural History, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Viswanath, B., Mislove, A., Cha, M. and Gummadi, K. 2009. On the Evolution of User Interaction in Facebook, Conference: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Workshop on Online Social Networks, WOSN 2009, Barcelona, Spain, August 17, 2009

West, L. and Trester, A. 2013. Facework on Facebook: Conversations on social media, In: Tannen, D. Tannen and Trester, A. (eds.), Discourse 2.0.: Language and new media, Georgetown University Press, pp. 133-54.

Further Reading:

O’Hagan, 2019. Using census records to trace the owner of a birthday book… with an unexpected twist! Cardiff University Special Collections and Archives, 4 October, https://scolarcardiff.wordpress.com/2019/10/04/using-census-records/

O’Hagan, 2017. Guest post: The birthday book: tracing an absent presence, Cardiff University Special Collections and Archives, 15 March, https://scolarcardiff.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/birthday-book/