We hear all the time of the dangers of social media. When I was a kid it was all about the dangers of pop music, the dangers of alcohol, the dangers of going out with the wrong kind of boy. Turns out pop music wasn’t so bad, alcohol is okay in moderation and one person’s ‘wrong boy’ is just my cup of tea!
Conservatives with a capital ‘C’ don’t like the mobilising effect of platforms like Facebook and Twitter and positively hate the role the web can play in disseminating information and illuminating falsehoods. I personally have had such an incredible education in learning about other people’s life experiences through Facebook. Love it or hate it, people tend to be alarmingly honest about who they are on there.
Obviously, anything taken too seriously or too often can be problematic.
I use the Screen Time reminder on my phone to boot me off Twitter and Instagram and I deleted the FB app. I have a self-imposed a 10-minute time limit on FB and pretty much just use it for my Paris content marketing for my books.
We owe it to ourselves to keep a lid on this stuff. If you can’t control it (this goes for anything in your life for that matter), it will control you.
I listened to Jaron Lanier on the Alan Alda podcast Clear and Vivid. If you haven’t heard of him then do yourself a favour and have a listen/watch. Just don’t go down a Youtube rabbit hole and end up watching conspiracy theory videos til three in the morning.
And now for the News…
There was an advert on the telly last night for a National News platform. I was a little disturbed by it. All companies obviously want loyal customers and their advertising is always directed at getting you to use their product, hopefully exclusively. This offending advert had a popular lifestyle show host extolling the virtues of using this particular News company to ‘get all your news’. Why, he asks, would you go to lots of different sites to get your news when you can find it all on one app? Indeed. Slippery slope.
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