Don’t even tell me if there’s a new social media platform. I won’t know what it does or what makes it special, and I’m pretty sure it will involve some specific brain pleasure-center rewiring that will make it impossible to connect with old-fashioned happiness. Not only that, but I figure if I jump on board and give it the old college whirl, it will already be obsolete. I’d feel like a pre-spurned lover. And who needs that?
I don’t enjoy Twitter. I haven’t looked at Instagram, or Tik Tok, or WhatsApp, or Tumblr, although I’ve heard some of them can give you a disease if you swipe the wrong way, which is also true of toilet paper.
If it’s not a new way to interact with strangers, it’s a new way to communicate, and if I get one more of those I won’t have any idea how to get hold of anybody. Does my friend answer the phone? Which one? Answer texts? Answer emails? Answer Facebook Messenger? Everyone has a preferred communication portal, and you have to remember which one works for each individual.
So the other day I was looking at my email (which I always answer, BTW, unless I forget, which could happen, because my personal software is glitchy), and there was something in there that purported to be from a phone number, not a name. And when I opened it, it went straight to a conversation icon in my dock that I’d never seen before. It says “Messages” but I don’t remember ordering up such a thing. I clicked on it. Inside were four messages, all from phone numbers. I don’t know whose. (Remembering people’s phone numbers is an old and currently irrelevant skill. You can’t even show that off anymore. You try to impress someone by rattling off your childhood friends’ phone numbers and people squint at you like they’re wondering if you can pull off a Rain Man thing in Las Vegas.)
Two of the four phone numbers I was able to figure out from the context of the message. The one about estimating a fence is from the fence guy. I don’t know why his message is hanging out in the dock on my laptop. He has my phone number. Seems coy to me. It’s like if someone wants to get hold of you by skulking in the shrubbery going Psst. The other three messages have apparently been hanging out in limbo in my dock for a while now.
So I looked up this Messages thing. I still don’t know why it exists. Says you can text someone at any time with it. Couldn’t you before? And why isn’t it on my phone?
I’m missing out. But at least, thanks to my considered avoidance of these things, I have no Fear Of Missing Out. You want to get hold of me for certain, see if you can get your message projected on the wall across from my toilet.
A few days ago I actually wrote somebody a letter. You know, on paper, that goes in an envelope with a stamp on it. At least that's unlikely to be overlooked.
For electronic communications, all we really need is phones for talking and e-mail for writing. Everything else is just a pointless minor variation on e-mail.
If people insist on something new, maybe we should bring back carrier pigeons. Or use owls, like in Harry Potter.
Or chickadees with Post-Its.
I may have mentioned this before, but I knew we were all headed for trouble with too many platforms when I had to explain to a Gen-Z gal that we really can't do real estate sales contracts via text message…..
…And in the spirit of true confession, I must admit that I have Uncharitable Thoughts about Younger People and their communications/social media platforms. You see, I picture some sort of electronic apocalypse, where after the dust settles it is only the Boomers who are able to communicate, because we still have hard-wired land lines……
… and pencils and cursive writing …
I don't have a hard-wired land line anymore. I'm screwed. My plan is to remain friendly with the neighbors.
Not a fan of most of the social media platforms here, either, although I have found a few Twitter accounts worth reading; I go mostly for the funny ones with animals. You know, even among that sub-category, there are some that transcend and some that are complete dreck. It depends so much on the person behind them.
I think I have way too many ways to waste time already.
I don't have FOMO either, maybe I'm in a rut, maybe I'm too old to care, but phone texting and internet emailing is enough for me, plus the blogs I read. Everything else is TV, kindle and real books. I barely even go outside and talk to people.
Too old to care is good enough. Life is short, as we are well aware at this point. The machines are so demanding and fickle. Screw that!
More and more I just want to be outside and not listen to noise.
Yep!
Me, too. I do my one-hour walk early in the ring when there's very little foot traffic, then it's home for the rest of the day, prone on the couch, cat on chest, NYT at the ready. I'm 83. Brain still works and I'm working hard to make the body last, too.
I find that all this technology that is supposed to make our lives easier, actually saps a lot of time. First you have to learn how to USE the new techie gadget. Then it takes over your life, so you spend more time with it instead of doing other more productive things. Then, every year or so, it's declared "outmoded," so you have to spend big bucks to get a new one, and learn to use the new features on THAT one. Fuck that. I still have my older computer, which works fine for what I use it for (mainly reading a few blogs and doing e-mail.) Paul and I both have flip phones (which have been declared outmoded because of the new 4G network or some such, so they will send us new ones. They know damn well by now that we're not buying any fancy models.) We don't text, and I have had the phone company even disable texting because I was getting too many ad texts — which I had to pay for!
It's funny how millennials think that it's rude to call people, as that was the original use for a telephone. They also think it's rude to ring a doorbell. UPS, USPS, and Fed-Ex used to ring my doorbell when I had a delivery. Not any more. Sometimes I go out the next morning to get the paper (yeah, I'm old school) and see that I had a package delivered the previous evening.
I was startled the first dozen times someone texted me to find out if it was a good time to call, but I've come around. I kind of like the phone not ringing.
Since I am only concerned with Paul and I being able to contact each other, when I wish to "be alone", I just shut off the phone. There is no one else important in my life, so as long as we're both home, everything's okay.
test
I closed my FaceBook account, my Twitter account and my Instagram account. Someone in town asked me why I left FaceBook, was it the politics, and I said no, I left because I was tired of all the rhetorical questions — but I think it was more because I was tired of all the misquotes and misattributions and the people who defend them because "it makes me feel good." (I hadn't been doing enough Twitter or Instagram for anyone to wonder why I'd stopped.)
I never had any of these accounts to begin with. It seems to me that people who say that they have NO TIME to exercise-cook from scratch-clean their house-get out of their fucking pajamas have one particular thing in common: they spend an awful lot of time on the internet, particularly FaceBook. Frankly, I'm not really interested in "people." I like particular persons, but 'people" as a species… not so much.
"pity this busy monster, manunkind, not" —E. E. Cummings
Just all depends. I enjoy my facebook page. It's full of bird pictures. And the occasional salamander. And I've made friends on it that I sometimes forget I've never met.
I updated my will not so long ago, and as I couldn't get to my Legal Eagle in person as I would have in The Before Times, we engaged in a Zoom meeting where I signed in his vision on my iPhone and then posted the document back to him – combining platforms.
Although everything's been done before, there's always something new, eh?
For me, there are new things every day that are the same new things they were the last time I discovered them.