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I am not yet finished listening to The madness of crowds  by Douglas Murray but I am nearly there.

This book was recommended to me by one of my most intelligent, well read and insightful friend (name not necessary at this stage).

This comes off the back of me reading Murray’s previous book “The strange death of Europe” on recommendation from another extremely well read and intelligent friend of mine.

You have to be careful these days when you talk about what you read or who you’ve read because you will be judged by the content of the book that has been written by someone else, despite what you might or might not think about the content.

Douglas Murray is a Neo-conservative thinker who pulls no punches but is extremely persuasive in some of his views.

I am not daft enough or insane enough at this stage to go into some of the deep concepts of either of those two books, but the overriding sense that something seriously wrong run’s through the whole content of the madness of crowds and it relates to social media.

Two or three weeks ago, my daughter’s boyfriend took great glee in the fact that he found that I had an Instagram account, but I last posted in January 2015.

It is very banal.

It has a picture of my breakfast and a pig’s head from one of the courses that I ran and one of me with double chins!!

There is nothing on that account of any interest to anyone (including me) apart from perhaps a photograph of my son and daughter.

Sadly (or not as the following paragraphs will show) my Facebook account is the same.

I haven’t posted on that since about the same time (apart from this blog) and there is nothing controversial to find.

I had one minor spat with someone at one point, which was at no significance to anyone.

Sadly, this is not the case for many in the modern world of social media.

Social media has removed the boundary between personal and public conversations and removed the ability to apologise.

Forever and ever, anything that you said, either inappropriate or not is now held and stored.

Should you apply for a job in the future and you had lost your way on social media, one night a decade ago after you’d had a drink it may ruin your job prospects and in fact may compromise your existing jobs should people find out.

Should you “make it” and be cast quickly into the public eye, your social media history will be raked through until something is found which will discredit you.

It only takes one person in the world to find it and to push it forwards for it to ruin you and the stories of ruin in Douglas Murrays book are so astonishing and terrifying that it completely vindicates my decision to come off the platforms 5 years ago.

I wrote about this a lot at the time and in fact came off social media specifically when I found myself standing downstairs in the kitchen looking at posts of people in a Facebook group who were lifting weights and being annoyed, while my Wife was upstairs trying to go to sleep where I should have been and then realising and  wondering why I was there.

I spent so much of my time looking at stuff which was nothing to do with me and nothing to do with my life and not enhancing it in any way that I realised that the benefits of this new form of communication were massively outweighed by its toxic advantages.

I have communicated that to my children and asked them to use it responsibly and I think that we have achieved a particularly good balance in that regards.

My kids understand the dangers and the toxic nature of these platforms and we have been very open in discussing that.

My kids also understand that anything they put on social media will be seen forever, including in decades time in places where they might not yet be able to judge what the landscape looks like.

As the world begins to pull their eyes (and social media has been a great part of this) into small toxic tribes at each end of every single spectrum that exists, you will be caught and you will be held to account by random people who don’t know you or who you are or why you did what you said or have no context.

It might be easier to think that my “business interests” might have been disadvantaged by my absence on social media platforms but that doesn’t really seem to be the case.

(Even if it had, I wouldn’t be able to tell because I have nothing to compare it to).

Someone said to me the other day that they believe that only about 600 dentists who were properly active on Facebook out of 30,000 these groups of people keep continually posting and their friends keep continuingly liking and commenting and every so often they get an odd one and a random one, which anecdotally makes them feel like they’re making progress.

In an age where you can buy Instagram followers in bundles to make you look like you’re popular, it is worth remembering the negative aspects of this and where, in a moment, your career or even your life can be extinguished.

Blog Post Number - 2162