Another five days have passed since the last post. Five days in which I stopped the cross-posting escapade, put up sign posts notifying the change, and then didn’t post anything new for the curious to find on arrival here at the “one blog to rule them all”.
I did wonder about writing a dramatic title – as seems to the fashion at the moment – something just incendiary enough but lacking enough detail to draw people in. Something along the lines of “The end of all things”. I think the definition of “Armageddon” is “the end of all things” – but in my case it’s more “the end of most things”. Perhaps I’ll go with that.
What do I mean by “the end of most things”?
I killed my Twitter account a few weeks ago, and had high hopes of spending some time exploring Threads and perhaps learning to like it. While doing so, a creeping sense of “what’s the point?” overtook me, and I’ve not looked in since. I’ll try and give it another go, but can’t help feeling that Meta will introduce ads soon, and the game will be up. It’s already filled with people racing to add friends, but interacting with nobody.
I’ve been wondering about Instagram too. I’ve been posting random little square photos on Instagram for years, and seem to have lost sight of “why”. It’s become something I do, purely because it’s something I do.
I hardly ever set foot in Facebook any more. The monkeys took over the asylum a long time ago. When I do look in, all I tend to find are robot accounts posting random conversation starters – with legions of people either too stupid to realise they are replying to a robot, or mansplaining to anybody that might read that it’s a robot post, and that AI is responsible for anything and everything wrong in their world this week. The little human interaction left at Facebook seems to be dominated by politically motivated, racist, bigoted posts filled with fear, uncertainty, doubt and lies by people of a certain age that should know better. I’ve “unfollowed” a lot of people over the last few years.
I still use Facebook Messenger – mostly because friends use it, and it’s free from the cacophonous noise. My preferred messaging app has been WhatsApp for a while – mostly because it isn’t full of advertorial nonsense. If you look in the contact page here, you’ll find my WhatsApp details – do send me a message – in contrast to this mostly cynical post, I’m generally a ray of f*cking sunshine.
No, seriously.
Last week during a team call at work with perhaps twenty people online, somebody called me out – mid conversation:
“Can I just ask Jonathan a question?”
(I immediately started to panic – what had I done wrong?)
“How are you always so happy?”
(I smiled and shrugged, not knowing what to say)
“Seriously – what’s your secret? You turn up on these calls, and you’re always positive and happy, no matter what’s going on”.
I raised my coffee mug into the camera shot, and point at it, grinning.
Coffee solves everything.