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Losing Face, gaining Book

July 6th, 2016 · Posted by Skuds in Life/Technology · No Comments · Life, Technology

BackBaby“Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends, we’re so glad you could attend, come inside! come inside!”, as ELP said, or as the legendary George Costanza would say “I’m back baby!”

All of which is just to say that, having neglaected this website for ages, I shall probably be posting more often from now on.The reason is that I have finally got around to ditching Facebook so this is the only place I have left to vent exept for Twitter and 140 characters may be too many for a few of the things I like to say but far too few for most.

For a long time I had found Facebook to be more of a chore than a pleasure. Every time I logged on there was a huge pile of posts. Most were just noise, but I would still plough compulsively through in case I missed something important, which there rarely was.

The sheer banality of it all was getting to me, whether it was the endless photos of meals, parkruns and animals, the endless bickering on Labour party forums, the duplication of tweets that I would also see on Twitter, the semi-targetted adverts, or variations of the same memes, I was getting to the point of having enough of the toxic mixture of sanctimony, banality, humble-bragging, sniping, and general fuckwittery.

And yes, I am aware that my own contributions were no better.

The last straw was seeing so many people I know trotting out the old “I wan’t my country back” crap during the referendum campaign. I realised that I could have got sucked into wasting even more time there if I got drawn into those arguments. The realisation that I was personally acquainted with so many racists was a bit depressing, and the stimulus to do what I should have done ages ago.

The problem is that to interact with people on Facebook you have to call them ‘friends’. On Twitter you just ‘follow’ them, which doesn’t imply the same level or quality of relationship. While I might be happy to follow people I don’t like on Twitter I have a bit of a mental block about having them described as friends. I suppose I could have just done a purge of the friends, but it seemed easier to go with the big bang approach.

In the week or so since I deleted my Facebook account I have read three books and instead of scrolling through social media over breakfast I now find that I can polish off the Cell Blocks, Kakuro, Futoshiki, Codewords, Polygon, Lexica1 and Lexica2 puzzles on the Tmes website before I go to work, and I feel a lot better for it.

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