Anti Social Media
I just checked the temperature on my phone – it's 33 centigrade, at 10pm. Madness. I've been hiding out for most of the day on the shaded side of the house – but as evening has drawn on the house seems to have realised what I was doing, and thought “that's enough of that!”.
The town brewery is open this weekend for visitors – several of my co-workers went today, and invited me along with them. I chose to spend the day with the kids instead – partly because I like spending time with them, and partly because I didn't want to throw Sunday away with a hangover. Work has been so crazy recently that I really value the weekends. This morning I was up at 7, along with Miss 18. By 9am we had both showered, dressed, and walked into town grocery shopping together. That was before the sun turned itself up to 11. Apparently we're returning to town in the morning to buy fruit and vegetables from the new grocer in town.
I gave Miss 18 an idea this morning that I've been thinking about for a few days. She didn't go to university – after a couple of years at college, she left education to start a full time job and rapidly discovered that her circle of friends had disappeared. I thought I might help her – and other young people in the area – to do something about it. With a bit of arm-twisting from me, she has created a Facebook group, advertising itself to 18 to 25 year olds in the local area that find themselves in a similar situation – where they can hopefully reach out to each other to meet up for coffee, movies, and so on. I think a fair amount of further arm-twisting might be needed to encourage them to get over themselves, but so far so good – there seemed to be a steady trickle of interest.
I can't imagine how difficult it must be for young people to form friendships these days. Everybody seems to hide behind their phones, and dating has been reduced to a random swipe-left crap-shoot based on a heavily filtered set of photos – and if a hook-up doesn't work out, it appears people have become mostly disposable – there are plenty more swipes in the sea. In a way it's been comforting to read that the latest generation are rejecting social media – but if that means hiding behind self destructing messages in Snapchat and Instagram stories, I can't help feeling like that's a step backwards. If you leave no trail, nobody can discover you.
The World Wide Web was invented to help connect people to information. We now have vast cities of people online, gathering on popular platforms to interact with each other – only they are not interacting – they are standing on soap boxes, shouting in to echo-chambers that leave no trace. It's all very strange.
Anyway. It's getting late. I'm going to go check in with Miss 18 to see how the group is going, do some arm twisting, and then turn in for the night. Fingers crossed.