I've made a career in technology. I have wonderful friends. Until 16 Nov 2024, I was on no social media. If you knew my name to Google it, you would get zero hits.
Your smartphone is not your life and doomscrolling is definitely bad for your mental health.
These are just my opinions.
In the 70s and 80s, Technology was lauded as giving us all more leisure time, instead it is used to manipulate and control us into working harder and harder to make corporations and the rich richer.
A yearning for ‘Breturn’ flowers
Let's Put "Breturn" back on the Bus. Brexit Crashed and Burned, causing the penny to Drop. "We want BReturn", a yearning for "BReturn" flowers.
Good article, strikes many chords with my own experience. I remember, for example, a feeling of slight panic when new electronic devices started playing much-loved albums in a random (wrong) order and without end. Felt a lot better after I found out how to stop that.
Also fb groups keep communities together, helping many to meet IRL. It will be hard to leave (but can be corralled a bit. When Bluesky gets an IG dupe I’ll dump it and mov
I was on the internet when it was just words (no pix!) and even doing a reply to an email was a challenge. We were all so idealistic. So hopeful. And then the carpetbaggers arrived in about 1999. Sure there were always bad people(PayPal).
I am trying to remove myself from social media apps. I’m not a teenager, but do find the lack of engagement impacts my mental health. I joined a local club recently and felt so invigorated to meet with other people. It was divine!
It's no secret these billionaires/millionaires profit from the masses' dependence, using psychological tactics. People were warned but ignored it or were already too hooked to care. The real question is, how many will wake up to the dangers now?
Shame on us for being so stupid, though. Tim Berners-Lee shared the World Wide Web for free. Links Torvalds gifted Linux - still the most stable operating system (used by Musk, Google, NASA, Cern... ) DeepSeek is open source...but we have chosen to enrich Silicon Valley who monetised it all.
The idealistic start of the century when it was thought that the internet was for good, platforms were not designated as publishers, it was a mistake. Time to correct that mistake.
Comments
Your smartphone is not your life and doomscrolling is definitely bad for your mental health.
These are just my opinions.
Time to explore different social media options & I hope, time to discover British or EU platforms.
Let's Put "Breturn" back on the Bus. Brexit Crashed and Burned, causing the penny to Drop. "We want BReturn", a yearning for "BReturn" flowers.
No courage to be found anywhere.
And they are supposedly the best of our society. Great minds? Maybe we deserve all of this...