Many of you may not be old enough to remember a time before Internet. I am sadly one of those old bastards that can remember what life was like before the dawn of the internet promising to write checks its ass couldn’t cash.
Brought about with it’s promises to simplify and make our lives easier. Promises and hopes of being more connected with friends and family.
Promises that were a load of shit. While I don’t know that I would necessarily want to go back to pre-internet and smart phone days, I can’t deny life was sweeter. And yes, it could just be my perception.
Social Media with it’s facade of everyone showing off their best life. Initially it to, was well intended and served a purpose. Now days, I don’t even know wtf FaceBook is. I see less and less posts from friends and family, and more main stream media crap. More and more ads. You searched for a birthday gift for a friend on Amazon or anywhere online…surprise surprise, ads for that very specific item or niche instantly appear on social media.
You can literally go nowhere these days without being bombarded by ads. They have some gas stations now that annoyingly play commercials/ads while you pump. Yes…that’s exactly what I want to see while I spend more of my money on overpriced petro.
I’m honestly surprised stores haven’t put mini tv’s on stall doors now, so when you go to the bathroom in their store, they bombard you with more ads. Or before you can use a self check out, you have to watch an ad. Before you can turn on your car to drive, please watch this ad. Before you can turn on any new appliances, watch this. Do this, watch this, buy this…consume, consume, consume….. Slavery is dead? You really think so?
Back to social media. I honestly do not know why I keep it up/open because no one in my life whom I care about like close friends or family even bother to keep in touch across social media. 9/10 comments on anything I post these days are from dumb ass co-workers or people from my past who like to chime in some smart ass contrary comments to oppose logic and common sense.
Probably the same people who would act like they couldn’t believe I un-alived myself, and how tore up about it they are. They’d sit there and pretend over social media like they genuinely cared and were friends. Not even the few friends and family I have left, care. It’s all FAKE ass shit.
So not only does my family not bother to ever text or call anymore, they don’t even bother to keep up with me over social. So I’m left wondering why I even bother with any of it. It’s become nothing more than a tool for scammers, identity thieves, criminals and 3rd party advertisers who buy and use my information against me.
And yet, I bet if I were to shut it down or tell everyone I’m shutting it down, they’d be like…”but why, how else will we stay in touch?” It’s called TEXTING AND OR PICKING UP A DAMN PHONE AND CALLING AND SAYING YOU’D LIKE TO SEE ME?! But…that would be a lie. So let’s just keep pretending online so everyone in YOUR life doesn’t think you’re a POS and I’m a POS.
( All social media sucks. )
3 comments
I’ve been distancing myself from social media for the past few years, it is a source of depression, the algorithm learns what riles you up, and gives you more of it. Well, I was brought up to believe it is better not to look at such things.
I have one friend who will only communicate with me by social media, and for the sake of that one friend I check every notification email from social media I get, but that’s where my interaction usually stops. No new messages, no need to disturb the beast
Ironic that these things which were supposed to connect us have only driven us further apart.
I hear ya man, now they’re even trying to put Ads in the sky. Sounds impossible but according to some news articles on the internet a couple of companies are developing some kind of technology that will allow them to pollute our beautiful skies with digital trash. It’s quite sad actually.
I was born in 1996 so I wasn’t exactly as outdoorsy as earlier generations, but I wasn’t so young that I can’t remember seeing a dramatic shift in social behavior when smartphones came around. I remember the first cell phone I got was a Motorolla EnV2 flip phone and this was back when I was a 7th grader.
I didn’t have any friends in grade school or for most of my high school years but that’s mainly due to the extreme social anxiety I had back in those days. Either way I had a social life but instead it was with my cousins because we were really close, and I had so many of them (17 total). Most of them were around the same age as me too. So, although I didn’t have any friends in school, I still had a social life outside of school.
Eventually my youth came to an end, and I graduated High School. I don’t think I really noticed just how toxic the digital world was getting despite having grown up with it in its early stages. I mean I can recall a time when MySpace was a popular website among my older cousins. Then afterwards Facebook came along and that was the new big thing. I never created a Facebook until 2 years after my high school graduation. I was under the impression that the only people who had Facebook had friends and I was a loner in school so I didn’t bother creating an account all these years. When I created my account, I was shocked how many of my relatives had Facebook. Right off the bat I started getting friend requests from family members and relatives. I found this kinda bizarre, I mean these people weren’t my ‘friends’, they were supposedly more. Then I would sometimes get friend requests from old classmates but never hear a peep from them which I found quite odd. Why send someone a “friend” request if you don’t wanna talk to them I wondered. Things only got stranger when I started seeing family members and relatives post deep thought-provoking things on their profiles. My mom in particular seemed to post something new almost every other hour every day. Sometimes they were quite depressing posts about what she was thinking, and it just made we wonder why nobody in my family could tell me about these things in person. Why the hell do they say these things on Facebook but never in person? How could they expect their “loved” ones to understand them if they never wanna speak about these things in the real world? It pissed me off the more I scrolled through these people’s profiles because I found out they had been doing this for years. All these years of silence from them in the real world and I had been apparently too disconnected from the digital world to see what was really on their mind this whole time. I don’t get that. I mean surely they know people can read their posts right? I find it ridiculous that they can say such deep things on Facebook but not in person. I found that really unfair because these people try to act like they’re genuine in the real world but fail to speak their minds. I found this very shallow.
It’s quite disgusting what these corporations are doing to people’s minds especially nowadays. The all-too-common excuse you hear from every generation is “That’s what every generation says” or “ok boomer….shut up with your back in my day crap!”
I mean if every generation is saying this then perhaps there IS something going on. I’m only 25 years old and even I can see just how rapidly things have changed over the past decade or two. Change on it’s own isn’t automatically good. Change can be bad. I’m not saying nothing good has happened over the years and I’m not saying all technology is bad. I’m just saying AfflictedSmile makes some very good points on this post. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking similarly as him.
social media is causing more harm than good these days. but i dont think the concept is flawed. as with all ‘advances’ it merely exposes how foolish the human race is. take the car for example. before the car you had to be content limiting your entire life, ambitions and circle of friends to a 20 mile radius at best. your entire world. and sure life may have been more tranquil for some, but if you wanted to do more with your life you were pretty screwed.
so back to social media, just like the car it allows us to expand our potential. we can connect with people on the other side of the world, share knowledge, organise important events or hell just talk to people who might understand you, like here on this site. and the downside, just like the car, is that it brings potentially fatal consequences. internet bullying just like ahole drivers can kill. online peer pressure just like traffic can trap us, choke us and scramble our brains. it all comes down to self governance which humans consistently prove they cant do.
pollution from rampant use of cars has doomed us beyond the point of no return. i think the same will soon happen with the internet. a tool that was ours for inspiration and progress is instead infected with negativity, hate and tutorials on how to shoot up your high school. once again the human race proves it doesnt deserve to live