Concrete Pencil: Facebook tribute to a friend

Other social networking sites are available but Facebook is ubiquitous and so it alone serves a distinct function.

So you get boring updates from people you don't really like, saying things you have no interest in hearing.

But when actual real life comes along and smacks you or someone you know hard in the soft groin, something strange happens.

Facebook, almost despite itself, becomes astonishingly useful and helpful.

In the past week, a man of the Wharf who daily inhabited the multitude of joys life can provide, died. Another became a father. Another got married.

The response to each of these events was helped by Facebook.

Friends paid tribute to that fine fellow, memories were exchanged, photos shared and funeral arrangements publicised easily.

Others could share in the joy of the first baby picture and those not at the wedding saw the pictures by midnight.

It's like having a news website for your friends. And like news websites, most of the time they're boring. Unless you're some kind of sad-sap news addict, you don't get much out of the endless bombardment of fact packaging. 

But when it's interesting - the election, the World Cup - it locks your interest for weeks.

And that's not because news is good or that Facebook has become more interesting - it's that life is an enormous, ridiculous thing and sometimes you are reminded of its size, and its capacity for horror and joy.

At first it felt a bit odd, a bit icky, to use Facebook that way.

A little thumbs-up doesn't seem sufficient to express one's bursting happiness at a friend becoming a parent.

But that initial caution went when you worked out that Facebook was just another tool on the box, one more thing for humans, friends, to use to communicate, share, support and help.

And it's giving us a thing we didn't have before. It has refined once again the endlessly refinable communication process. So on Facebook you have a forum to show your closeness without the danger of intruding.

At the funeral, one of the most touching moments was the description of a picture the man had shared of him fishing in a trout river with his infant daughter snuggled in a baby backpack on his shoulders.

What a perfect image of a man enjoying life to the absolute full, and how wonderful that he had been able to share that picture.

Rest in peace, David Watkins.