A DAD'S LIFE:Every day I waste my life away on Facebook and Twitter
I WANT to light a bonfire in my garden and dance around it screaming at the 21st century to sling its hook. The fuel for this fire: each of my online social media accounts. I want to burn you Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I want to annihilate you all, even the ones I’ve registered for and forgotten. Yes, Plaxo, you too will end in ashes.
But why? Doesn’t Facebook allow you to stay in touch with lost friends living in distant climes? Doesn’t Twitter grant you immediate access to breaking news ensuring you aren’t for a moment out of the loop? And LinkedIn? How can I possibly propose myself as an employable independent professional without LinkedIn and a minimum of 300 connections followed by a swagbag of testimonials to my impressive work ethic?
Every day I waste my life away on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I have no need to browse through a vague acquaintance’s (who happens to be a Facebook friend) cousin’s holiday snaps from Austria. But I do because I can because she has made her photos open to the public.
Willie O’Dea’s demise was being tweeted for an hour before the major networks had it. An hour that would make no difference in my life. And even though its immediacy is what Twitter fans shout loudest about, what Twitter really does is allow those who shout the loudest, shout louder. I watched Ireland beat England at Twickenham alone at home and felt disappointed not to have someone to share the experience with. As an alternative, I tweeted my joy. Afterwards I looked back on what I had written and felt queasy. Who was I sharing with? Why did I feel the need to bother? Sad as it is, I wanted to be part of that shouty gang.
You dip a toe in Facebook and Twitter complaining that you have no grasp of how and why they work and an hour later believe the world is interested in your thoughts on Palestine. I’m as guilty of this as the next man (in fact, obviously more so having written a personal column for years) but what sticks in my craw is the fast-becoming-accepted truth that, rather than indulging your narcissism, you are part of the onward march towards a shared and important knowledge.
Balls. You’re trying to be funnier, smarter, more connected than the next guy. Funnier and smarter than people you’ve never met, and more connected to the same information everyone else has.
Now, to drag this social media rant back to the point of this column, my growing need for immediacy and access to the world’s holiday snaps is affecting my children. Kids today do much the same things as we did, they go out the door to school and come home with tales. They bring their projects, their interests and their stories of adventures with friends with them. Just as we all did.
Except now, because I can, I feel the need to enhance their experience with additions I can provide as I, being a tuned-in kinda guy, am plugged into the ether in which floats the sum of the world’s stuff.
If the elder is humming a Beatles song her guitar teacher was playing, I can show her a YouTube clip of the band playing that very song live. The younger is excited about starting a new Roald Dahl book. Great, I can pull up pictures of the author’s once-plump, now rake thin, model grand-daughter.
None of this makes any difference to them. If anything, that knowledge dilutes the intensity of pleasure they feel as they discover the world for themselves. More than that, it takes away from their experience, making everything they think they have to themselves mine also, or worse, the rest of the world’s.
Writing on his blog, The School of Life, on March 1st, Alain de Botton said this: “The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulse, is something we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people and ideas.” (And no, the irony of quoting from a blog is not lost.)
Much of the time I know too much about very little. All Facebook and Twitter do is increase the volume of the noise I have no need to hear. Some day I will find the strength to push them away.
abrophy@irishtimes.com