Time to cull boring social media

For me this has been the year the fun went out of social media. It has gone from being enjoyable to time consuming and a chore. I don’t have to waste time on it so increasingly I don’t bother. If there is anything interesting someone will tell me about it.

I do not need to know the news instantly, particularly from a source that may not have an ounce of journalism behind it. And I do not need to wade through pages of adverts and promotion for some nugget of information, a good story or a picture. One of the beauties of recording television programmes was that you could fast forward through the advertisements. On social media the advertisements have found me again and I don’t want to play. I am not a Luddite. I like having a very clever computer in my pocket most of the time. But I want it to do my bidding and not the other way around. The changes have not been predictable. It was assumed that no one would ever buy a camera again as their phone was able to take very good photographs and edit them. I have just been on a trip with a group of people all of whom carried smartphones and most of whom carried a good camera as well. They spent hours discussing lenses and the phone was never mentioned. It was thought that the watch would become redundant or become a mere piece of jewellery. Out of nowhere came a variety of watches that tell the time, and your activity, and the distance of your golf shot, and your BMI, and, if you do what they tell you, fitness is the inevitable outcome. People who never walked a yard in their lives are now listening to beeps and reaching targets as if there was no tomorrow. And because some of us like a good old-fashioned watch that only tells the time, people are beginning to wear a watch on each wrist — because if you go out for a meal and take off your fitness watch then your graph will have a gap and you will be told that you are being a lazy slob in the nicest possible way. There is no way to tell it you walked to the pub.

While I cull a lot of digital things over the holiday period there are a few things that I will have to consider adding. The days of free news from websites is nearing an end. More and more often you are asked to subscribe and frankly I am surprised it took so long. I still like the feel of a newspaper, but often may not be near a shop, and deliveries stopped last century. And I want my news and opinion articles to come with a bit of quality control. So 2017 is for me the year that the tide has turned and I will be deciding which publications I want, or more accurately, need access to. The Sunday Independent is, of course, top of the list.