Antisocial media
Social media are pretty antisocial.
As someone in Macbeth once said of booze and sex, it increases the desire, but takes away the performance. Social media sites are ok, as long as you stick to trivialities. You will get reactions from all 25 of the friends that Facebook lets you see if you post a picture of your cat, or a cartoon, or a picture with funny text (and no, those are not "memes", memes are something else). But if you post anything more important, you can't expect a reponse from more than 0.5% of your friends.
During July I was offering free copies of my book The Enchanted Grove, and no more than 5 people responded. If more people had liked and/or shared it, perhaps Facebook might have shown it to more people, but no, most people couldn't even be bothered to do that. And of course it contained a link to a site that Facebook probably didn't make any money off, so of course they didn't show it to people.
So from now on, I will resist any temptation to share anything I see on Facebook, whether trivial or profound. I will resist all temptation to look at the things Facebook "suggests" to me -- those are, of course the links that Facebook makes money off -- it seems that at the moment those are mostly British tourist promotion sites. Nor will I share any of the "memories" the Facebook offers to me, mostly photos that it reminds me of on the anniversary of the day I took them or the day I posted them on Facebook.
And my main online presence will be back here on LiveJournal where I started 20 years ago. After a few years I moved to Blogger, because that made posting quicker and easier than LiveJournal. And when that started getting clunky, I moved to WordPress. When WiordPress became impossible to use, I moved back to Blogger, and now Blogger is becoming clunkier I've moved back here to LiveJournal, which hasn't changed much at all, except that it has made it possible to post pictures on it, including pictures of my cat, which, of course, is what makes social media social.
If you want to see how clunky and unusable Blogger has become, just have a look at my Simple Links blog. Blogger used to have a neat feature called "Blog this", where you could cut a bit of text from a web article and paste it to your blog with a link -- it was what fulfilled the original purpose of a blog, to be a weB LOG, a log of web sites visited for interesting content so you could find them again. A few months ago the folks at Google decided to "improve" the Blog This thingy, and you can see the result if you go there now. They none of them learned the truth of the adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Except, perhaps, the people at LiveJournal -- that still works, for now.
Anyway, if you really want to be a friendly friend, please go and have a look at my book The Enchanted Grove (go on, click on it, I dare you!), and like and share it. It isn't free any more, but you still might like to read it, or know someone else who might like to read it, or know someone who has kids or grandkids or nieces or nephews who might like to read it.
Oh yes, and my cat.
Val gave me a kitten as a Christmas present in 1973, before we were married. I was living in Durban North then, and she was a dear little cat., and I called her Josephine. The climate in Durban North didn't suit her, and she had a skin disorder, for which the vet prescribed pills. A couple of years later we went on holiday, and asked someone to feed her while we were away, and give her her pills. But she would wander up to the local church hall where the members of the women's guild fed her scraps and tit-bits so she wouldn't eat her proper food, in which her pills were hidden. As a result her skin condition got worse. And one of the people who fed her scraps then took her to a vet and had her killed, and told us she had "funicular mange" (I kid you not).
Josephine's kitten Julie accompanied us to Utrecht, to Melmoth, and Pretoria. But that will be another story, andother post, and another cat picture for another day.
As someone in Macbeth once said of booze and sex, it increases the desire, but takes away the performance. Social media sites are ok, as long as you stick to trivialities. You will get reactions from all 25 of the friends that Facebook lets you see if you post a picture of your cat, or a cartoon, or a picture with funny text (and no, those are not "memes", memes are something else). But if you post anything more important, you can't expect a reponse from more than 0.5% of your friends.
During July I was offering free copies of my book The Enchanted Grove, and no more than 5 people responded. If more people had liked and/or shared it, perhaps Facebook might have shown it to more people, but no, most people couldn't even be bothered to do that. And of course it contained a link to a site that Facebook probably didn't make any money off, so of course they didn't show it to people.
So from now on, I will resist any temptation to share anything I see on Facebook, whether trivial or profound. I will resist all temptation to look at the things Facebook "suggests" to me -- those are, of course the links that Facebook makes money off -- it seems that at the moment those are mostly British tourist promotion sites. Nor will I share any of the "memories" the Facebook offers to me, mostly photos that it reminds me of on the anniversary of the day I took them or the day I posted them on Facebook.
And my main online presence will be back here on LiveJournal where I started 20 years ago. After a few years I moved to Blogger, because that made posting quicker and easier than LiveJournal. And when that started getting clunky, I moved to WordPress. When WiordPress became impossible to use, I moved back to Blogger, and now Blogger is becoming clunkier I've moved back here to LiveJournal, which hasn't changed much at all, except that it has made it possible to post pictures on it, including pictures of my cat, which, of course, is what makes social media social.
If you want to see how clunky and unusable Blogger has become, just have a look at my Simple Links blog. Blogger used to have a neat feature called "Blog this", where you could cut a bit of text from a web article and paste it to your blog with a link -- it was what fulfilled the original purpose of a blog, to be a weB LOG, a log of web sites visited for interesting content so you could find them again. A few months ago the folks at Google decided to "improve" the Blog This thingy, and you can see the result if you go there now. They none of them learned the truth of the adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Except, perhaps, the people at LiveJournal -- that still works, for now.
Anyway, if you really want to be a friendly friend, please go and have a look at my book The Enchanted Grove (go on, click on it, I dare you!), and like and share it. It isn't free any more, but you still might like to read it, or know someone else who might like to read it, or know someone who has kids or grandkids or nieces or nephews who might like to read it.
Oh yes, and my cat.
Val gave me a kitten as a Christmas present in 1973, before we were married. I was living in Durban North then, and she was a dear little cat., and I called her Josephine. The climate in Durban North didn't suit her, and she had a skin disorder, for which the vet prescribed pills. A couple of years later we went on holiday, and asked someone to feed her while we were away, and give her her pills. But she would wander up to the local church hall where the members of the women's guild fed her scraps and tit-bits so she wouldn't eat her proper food, in which her pills were hidden. As a result her skin condition got worse. And one of the people who fed her scraps then took her to a vet and had her killed, and told us she had "funicular mange" (I kid you not).
Josephine's kitten Julie accompanied us to Utrecht, to Melmoth, and Pretoria. But that will be another story, andother post, and another cat picture for another day.