Asking me to comment about technology is like asking asking Donald Trump to talk about etiquette. The two don’t mix.
But I’ve dabbled in the interwebs. I even created myself a MySpace page before another Trumpian, Rupert Murdoch, decided to get his greedy hands on it.
“Death by Murdoch,” reads the MySpace tombstone.
When I say “created”, that’s all it was. I created it and let it sit there. It really was good for no more than a couple of wasted hours hitting buttons on a keyboard.
I had a Twitter account, but I wasn’t overly keen on the extremist views. Can’t say I ever commented, but I read a lot of tripe written by anonymous morons with little else to do than to get on my goat.
I explored Reddit. It was just a highly parochial form of Twitter that allowed users to expand their tripe beyond 140 characters.
Then, I thought I’d found my happy place in Facebook. I set up an account just for family and friends, until one day I decided to join a group.
That’s where it began. The good extreme folk from Twitter and Reddit had made their way here too, to denigrate the positive thoughts of others who’d spent hours finding solutions to the world’s problems.
Who told them about Facebook, and why weren’t they happy with their own home of doom and gloom? Didn’t someone tell them Facebook was meant to be a place of peace?
There was a stage at one point that people were actually un-friending those who were constantly whining (yes, I get the irony) about stuff.
Yet, here I am whining about those who are whining on a platform I felt comfortable with.
Okay, I know I am able to rethink the groups I’ve joined. I’m able to stop looking at the screen at any time I like and instead opt for a paid subscription to the Washington Post, because you can do that now. Once, you’d have to wait three days for the paper to arrive.
Or I could choose which side of the fence I’d prefer to be on: The extreme left of what used to be Fairfax, or the extreme right of News Corp.
Let’s face it, I’m confused by it all. Without a safe zone to mix with my virtual friends, yet without the days of old where I mixed with real people, what do I do?
I like a good whinge as much as the next guy, but where do I get the right to do it without some other clown returning fire with nonsense, answers without substance, questions without question marks, comments without any sort of supporting evidence?
Where can I have my whine, yet escape the barrage and not be un-friended by my acquaintances?
I suppose there’s here. Here will have to do.
