It’s time I zucked off & became anti-social

MY name is James, and I am a Facebook addict. And I have been clean now for a good two, maybe three hours.

I first joined the platform back in 2007, and with friends and family around the world it became, at its best, a sort of rolling 24-hour discussion group and virtual dinner party.

But like a drunk who starts to wonder if the hangovers are worth the high, for some time now I have been wondering if it was giving back anywhere near as much as I was putting in — not just in terms of data, family photos and God knows how much personal information — but also time and energy. If your phone gives you a weekly screen time report, it can make for depressing reading indeed.

Instead of reading books, we’re reading headlines, and drawing huge, simple, and wrong conclusions from them.

Instead of playing with our children, we’re commenting on pictures of our friends’ kids.

Instead of phoning or videocalling or emailing our nearest and dearest around the world, we’ve liked each others’ photos and called it staying in touch.

And all the while being served up advertising that always feels a little too coincidental to just be the work of black-box algorithms. What a waste.

Now that Facebook has effectively stopped itself from being used as a discussion platform of anything vaguely current events related — they even blocked The Betoota Advocate! — I reckon I, and a lot of other people, will have a lot more time to do productive things, with real people.

I’m still on social media, of course. My Facebook page will remain, mostly because I don’t know how to get back all my pictures. And no true junkie can go completely cold turkey.

I’ll still have a scrap on Twitter (though I’m trying not to for Lent), and even though it’s part of the Facebook empire and might conceivably enrich Mark Zuckerberg by a few more pennies, I’ll still share pictures of my puppy on the ’Gram.

Route 66, from Chicago to Los Angeles, is one of the world’s classic roadtrips. And just as it traverses a big portion of the US, Australia’s Savannah Way covers a similar distance – almost 4000km. It links Cairns in Tropical North Queensland with Broome in Western Australia, passing through the Northern Territory, 15 national parks and five World Heritage areas.

I AM now a gestational parent and my husband is the nongestational one (Mercury, February 16). Honestly, why do we have to interfere with simple language? What about male same-sex couples raising a child? Which one of them would be the gestational parent? What am I to be referred to as a grandmother and a great grandmother? This is taking things way too far, language is being taken to silly extremes in a bid to “include” various segments of society whereas most of us look past the word to the meaning behind it. Next we’ll be eliminating words like see, walk, hear, feel and their relatives to avoid upsetting people who are blind, deaf, paralysed or have other disabilities. There was a short-lived movement in the UK a few years ago to stop people requesting tea or coffee as white or black, one was supposed to say with or without milk.

Jane Hall

Rokeby