As I've talked about a lot here over the last 10 years, I'm not on social platforms. I came off Facebook, which was my main platform in 2015; I did the same with Twitter then. I very briefly jumped into Instagram then, and my last post was a picture of my breakfast one day and a pig's head that I'd worked on in an oral surgery course.
From time to time, though, I'm drawn back in. So, as I was watching the Arsenal game from my hospital bed on Tuesday night and was discussing things with my son in Nottingham, he told me to have a look back at the goal I had already missed on Twitter (X), so I decided to re-login (took a little while). Back I was on a platform that I couldn't recognise and didn't understand.
I couldn't find the goal (I'm tech useless at platforms now), but what I could see was the feed that X (Twitter) was offering me.
What's interesting about this is that I'm not on here and don't post, select, or click, so the algorithm doesn't really know who I am (or so I believe - perhaps I'm wrong).
What it was offering me, though, was truly horrendous. It was an awful collection of discrimination, of right-wing rhetoric and of anti-anything that I cared to be shouted at or shouting to. It showed me arguments between people shouting and behaviour that would never ever be allowed in normal society, whatever normal society is anymore. It was divisive, sensational, and terrible.
I pride myself in trying to collect my information from places that are at least credible in one way or another and have some sort of integrity, and it certainly isn't on X.
I have had 10 years of detox from social media after I had gone into it quite deeply in my late 30s and early 40s.
I wonder if most other people would be able to have the ability to do that.
Could you step outside it and look back in after having had a little while of not listening to the noise in the echo chamber, only to see that what you've been looking at before was absolutely disgraceful and bigoted and unidimensional?
Enough is enough of this stuff (But it isn't). It's never going to stop, is it?
I feel like the little boy with his finger in the dam trying to stop the flood from coming that's just going to engulf and overwhelm all of us.
But until then, I will carry on in my own little bubble, not going back into X to see a goal that I didn't need to see that I could have watched today; I will remember that there is a life outside of these four walls and away from that screen.
Blog Post Number - 4158
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