Anti-Social Media

I dislike the idea of social media for the following reasons:

- A person who obsessively follows other individuals around spying on their personal lives is called a ‘stalker’. A person who obsessively wants others to spy into their personal lives is a ‘stalkee’. Just two sides of the same type of degenerate.

- I am very fortunate to still have some very dear friends from my school days. We freely chose to keep in touch. Many have visited and I have been delighted by their company. There were however quite a lot of guys at school who I didn’t really care for. These chaps may well be going through their mid-life crises as we speak and I am not at all keen on the idea that they be privy to the fact that I live in Barcelona. The possibility that a fatter, balder, recently divorced version of some shithead I never liked calling up my family back in Dublin and demanding my address is not one I intend to court. It pays to be invisible to all but those who matter. Thus the anonymous blog.

- The simple fact is that refusal often offends. A few months ago, I foolishly signed up for one of these professional social networks and now my personal e-mail account is getting flooded with requests from work contacts. I do take my job as seriously as the next man, but when I arrive home that’s that. There’s a change of bosses and office duty is replaced by domestic duty. I have not ‘friended’ or ‘colleagued’ or ‘merged’ or ‘whateverthefuckitscalled’ with any of these contact requests and now I worry that they might be feeling a bit rebuffed. This in turn might be detrimental to the professional side of things. What a mistake. Time to check if one can get linked-the-Hell-out.

- I like being completely alone and hate to be interrupted, especially when doing absolutely nothing. Aren’t those little quiet corners of the day just magical? Those rare, brief periods when you have nothing to do, no obligations to fulfil when you can just read a magazine, do a crossword puzzle, spew out a blog post or fritter it away in any way you choose. An hour is indeed a wonderful thing to waste. Then your mobile phone goes off and the spell is broken. That perfidious jingle represents an obligation to answer which in turn represents an obligation to converse which usually leads to some other obligation, - “let’s meet up!” – “Don’t forget to do the shopping!” – “Get out, get out, the house is on fire!” What a drag. I managed to live without a mobile phone right up to the birth of my kid. Oh happy days. If someone skypes me one more time while I’m halfway through a life-or-death game of Mahjong Titan, I might just throw my laptop out the window.

- My birthday is rapidly approaching and my lifelong ambition to become a curmudgeonly old fart is finally coming to fruition. “In my day we didn’t need no internets or phase-books, if ye wanted to make friends ye just got pissed down the pub. I don’t want a shop front window on me life! So bugger off all of you or I’ll set me dog on you!”