The picture may have been the tipping
point.
When we last spoke I mentioned the
negative reaction a picture I posted on Facebook.
I didn't post the picture for any negative reason; I posted it
because it was an interesting picture. Yet here we are, almost four
days after it went up, and I'm still seeing people complain about
what's in the picture.
(At this point, I suppose I should say
that you should read yesterday's post before continuing here. So
scroll down a bit and do so. Don't worry; we'll wait for you).
Okay. Now you're up to speed. The
whole affair actually ties into something I've been considering for
awhile, and that's that I may want to change my social media habits.
I started with Twitter, but left that because having so few characters to use makes people just seem way too
mean and/or narcissistic. I moved to Facebook, but
recently I've been starting to reconsider that decision. What
started as a way to keep up with friends and listeners has turned
into a non-stop barrage of shared posts about one eyed dogs, notices about 10-year old cars for sale, and really incendiary
political memes, almost all of which are usually wildly inaccurate or
outright lies. Hardly anyone writes anything new or original today;
everyone just seems to post or share stuff put together by third
party content providers and/or Russian trolls.
It's basically become Twitter with more
than 280 characters.
Social media, in a perfect state,
should exist to enhance your life, to keep you in touch with people
and to introduce you to places and ideas with which you might not be
familiar. Instead, it's become a giant algorithm that rewards posts
that get the most reactions, be they likes or hates. That means that
quite often the stuff that pisses off as many people as possible is
the stuff you see the most. And that makes me wonder—things are
bizarre enough in the real world these days. Why would I want to
spend some of my valuable non-real world time scrolling through
shared items designed to do nothing but inflame, and watch my stress
levels rise 15 times above their normal levels?
Doesn't make sense to me.
I know the world has become
increasingly polarized. I know you're supposed to be in one camp or
the other, and the camp you're not part of should be treated like the
enemy. And I know there's a lot of meanness and bullying out there,
especially when you don't have to express that dark side of yourself
to someone in person but can instead do it fairly anonymously
through a keyboard. But what used to be fun, and a way to escape the
stresses of the real world, has now turned into anything but fun.
And that's why I might just dump it.
Loraine, affected by the anger and
vitriol she sees in Facebook as much as I, has been dabbling with
Instagram recently. She only follows a few people and organizations,
and has found little or nothing in the way of shared content on the
platform. She thinks I might do well there, posting a picture a day
or sharing little history nuggets. And I have to admit—it might be
nice to go online and see original content put together by people who
don't spread fear and misinformation. It would be a new experience,
but it would be nice, and certainly a huge change from what Facebook
has become these days.
So if we're friends on Facebook and you
suddenly realize that I've not posted anything in forever, don't
sweat it. I just will have given up on it. And if I do that, I'll
let you know to which (if any) other platform I've migrated.
If you're interested, of course.
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