I’ve watched with outside interest as oracle take over TikTok in the United States.
The last I heard of TikTok it was called Musical.ly and little kids would make a video of themselves singing garbage on the internet.
Now it’s a sinister weapon of information.
So now it’s not enough that you have Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram and Snapchat, but we have TikTok too.
Once you’ve added that into your online task management system in your Slack group and of course your old-fashioned emails and don’t forget texts and phone calls where do you go next?
By the time you’ve finished checking and answering those things (multiple times a day) there really is time for nothing else and what has happened here is that you have been ‘directed’ under someone else’s influence.
As we dropped Grace off at University (when I say 'we' I mean Alison) it’s hard not to reflect on when I started my own journey of that type in 1989.
It would be 4 years until I would see a version of Word on a computer screen.
I had just finished learning how to type on an electric typewriter (not joking).
It would be 6 years until I had my first ever mobile phone (a Sony ‘Mars bar’ which was analogue and truly awful).
It would be 10 years until I owned my first laptop.
20 years on from that I got my first iPhone, 12 years on from that I read statistics of 48% of millennial's are anxious or very anxious in relation to social media.
We stopped our kids smoking but gave them social media instead.
We allowed our children to become addicted to a vision of themselves that was impossible to achieve and then to damage their mental health in pursuit of that vision at a speed faster than the speed of light.
Everyone loved lockdown because it gave them the chance to slow down but very quickly the majority of people returned as ‘pigs to the trough’.
The fastest surgeon is not (necessarily) the best surgeon.
The busiest person is not necessarily the best person.
The person who is the ‘best’ on Instagram is not necessarily the best, they’re just the ‘best’ on Instagram.
We’d hoped it wouldn’t go back to the way it was after lockdown but it did, perhaps we should consider using the next lockdown for something a little bit more productive if we’re not utterly scared to death.
Blog Post Number - 2502
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