An outstanding podcast from The Hanging Chads where they interview fellow old fart Pleasure Man of My Posting Career fame. The majority of the show is Pleasure Man talking about how social media and trends in major metropolitan areas has destroyed the family and triggered massive depression amongst nearly every one as we mindlessly substitute digital attention for real, in person attention. I would have been curious if they delved into how this may affect young men vs. women (free digital attention and free digital porn), but they unfortunately did not.
Before listening to this podcast I uninstalled facebook for a two week sabbatical from the platform, and may solely start to relegate it to just a press release mechanism and occasional texting tool. It got too annoying with constant dings and message reminders for increasingly petty things. Was becoming too much of a distraction and a time suck for what little free time I have left. Regardless, listen to the podcast as it delves into more detail about WHY you feel depressed only having a digital life and why you must get out and actually meet real people in the real world.
4 comments:
Get out and walk in the sunshine, too. Too much electric light and monitors makes us a little bit loopy. We need the Vitamin D, fresh air, and exercise.
Nothing new there on the social media front. Such comments have been around for a while.
If nothing else, remember these things:
1. Much of what people post on social media are frivolous items related to virtue signalling and the highlight reels from their own lives. Yes, they went to Paris and took attractive pics, but you didn't see all of the shit they went through to get those pics, including the lost luggage and the cab driver trying to stiff them out of an additional 50 euros.
In short, what you see isn't what you get.
2. Social media is designed to be addictive so that we keep our eyeballs glued to it, so that we can delivered to advertisers. That's how Facebook, for example, makes its money. It's all about data, data, data.
3. One unintended side affect of social media is that you can see the worst in people (e.g., virtue signalling and bullying), but then normal people will pale in comparison to what you can find out online. You'll find that there are more normies than you though there were in real life.
I've been experimenting with methods of managing my social media for the same reason. Always hated facebook, don't use it, but twitter can be just as much a time suck.
Using social media primarily for dissemination and setting a few quotes to post via tweetdeck has worked very well for me. Then scroll through notifications once a week or so.
To quote Nabeel Azeez, "[Social Media] is not a platform. It is a distribution channel."
I've started to like observing people at other tables at restaurants and seeing their behavior. Back when smart phones first started coming on the scene, aside from enthusiastic demonstrations you didn't really see people using them at the dinner table. A few years ago for the first time I saw a whole family- father, mother, 2 children, all sitting in silence with their phones out. I was dumbfounded. As the years have passed, that's not an uncommon sight anymore. Last Friday I was picking up some food at a steakhouse, and there was a family of 6 sitting in silence staring at their phones.
Civilization is crumbling.
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