Friday 25 April 2014

a return of sorts

to social media, then…
it’s 2012, and after 7 long years of fun and frolics (and several overly-cynical and sneering posts), i finally decided to quit facebook. it’s become such a huge part of modern online culture (no shit mate) that even as i write the ‘f’ word itself on my wee mac, auto-correct chips in and kindly offers to correct me and give the thing a capital ‘F’. like the idealistic chimp i am (tho it wanes with age, good lord…), i reject this sort of thing, a bit like how good ol’ christopher hitchens refused to spell ‘god’ with a capital ‘G’. except he had a principle, and i’m just poking my tongue out at a machine.

i even wrote some nonsense-musings on these very pages (as opposed to the intelligent, informative stuff also littered here, ahem), and although they still somehow make sense, i’ve come to think of myself during ‘the wilderness years’ since then as very much a lost little boy on a rather craply-made raft, less ‘spitting and pissing pointlessly into the wind’, more sitting there with vacant stare on the edge of my lonely vessel, water lapping at my childish brogues and seagulls taking it in turns to try and land a shit directly on my bonce. i slowly look up and shake my fist, but they’ve already fucked off. i’ll stop the metaphor there before convincing all and sundry that i’m completely insane, suffice to say that for the last one and a half years, it’s been kinda quiet.

and whilst there was no apparent hole to be filled by leaving fb, i found myself slowly becoming more open to other online tools-for-tools, and have since registered with twitter, instagram and spotify. the former is a wonderful thing, and despite the odd bit of shit that just won’t flush down the toilet despite several furious attempts (poor ellen page complaining after receiving constant pictures of avid fans’ dogs to rename after doing it once, and then helpfully tweeting each and every fucking one of them), it’s for the most part really interesting once you’re following the right people. and if they become tedious….get going on that flush!
very simple.
same with instagram. if people start posting too often what they’re having for breakfast, or their foot on yet-another-non-descript beach… off you toddle to look for the next big shiny thing.

and so if i embrace all this, why not fb? (you must be screaming…). 
how many times over the last eighteen months i’ve wondered how friends from far and wide are doing, and now with no way of finding out/gawping at their page.
and just last week, after booking a trip to my hometown back in blighty to catch up with long-lost compadres from my college days, it occurred to me while having some whimsical reminiscence to way-back-when, that i've lost touch with way too many folks from outside my little city. 
my idealistic approach of having more authentic contact in small doses (i.e. emails), and doing without the stasi-esque observation of others online has (somewhat unsurprisingly considering my pompous use of a thing much more serious) proven a tad fallible and, pseudo-intelligent language aside for a moment…… is complete bollocks.
this isn’t how things work these days, i almost hear you cry.
so, i was wrong.
very simple.

NB. i’m allowed to change my mind and edit this blog at any stage if i feel like it, just as i hear is the trend (seriously. tales of a girl who takes down new pics of herself unless they get more than twenty ‘likes’ reach me with a whiff of self-bummery even my most narcissistic friends would balk at). 
and especially if i receive a barrage of selfies to my wall / newsfeed (whatever it’s called these days..). selfies: NO. STOP.

and so now begins the humble process of trying to re-friend everyone, and then tweeting that i’ve done it with a #refriend at the end for good measure.


so, fb, you win….and my experiment failed. i embrace you (but gently, a bit like you were a homeless person).