Data Raped.

I went for a walk this morning, not far, just the streets around where I live, I need the exercise after my hip operation. It surprised me how many nods and smiles and 'good mornings' I received. I remember thinking to myself ‘there must have been a ‘purge’ of all the miserable negative people overnight’, or they might all be indoors tweeting or whatever it is that we are all supposed to be doing nowadays. Maybe it’s the solution to safer and happier streets, if all the moaners and the groaners and the ‘end is nigh’ folk stay indoors and argue online, then the rest of us can get on with our lives and each other. This being said - I am a ‘twitter warrior’ myself, spent hours the last couple of years, on twitter or other ‘social media’ outlets letting people know about my views, provoking, disliking, annoying etc etc ,it was good fun - annoying people that have different political or social views than I have. But it changes nothing, nada , sod all. When you tweet nothing happens - except that some people get annoyed and open a so say ‘debate’ that is never a debate, just a shouting match that ends when one party decides to ‘block’ or ‘ignore’ the other. So what is this ‘social media’ thing? just a way of keeping us occupied so that we don’t actually get around to doing anything constructive? There are some positives in social media - it has been used to gather support on important issues that might have been ignored, or forgotten about by traditional media. The downside is that it has opened the doors of hell and let the nutcases loose. Baseline is that social media is a big, gigantic ‘earner’ for the few. Every time we are on social media we get ‘data-raped’, we are being followed and being ‘defined’ so that advertisers can pinpoint the new (mainly useless) products that fit our profile. That’s it end of the business model, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are first and foremost businesses that are in the business of selling our data to third parties that want to know everything about us, they are not ‘neutral’ people loving organizations. Once again ‘it’s all about the money’. Meanwhile the hounds of hell are loose and we spend the majority of our days fishing for likes to stroke our ego, others spend their days offending, or arguing or just joining in the ‘hate soup’ on one subject or the other. This shit pool of ‘non debate’ creates an image of the whole world being seemingly at odds with each other, we get frustrated, hurt, elated, have sleepless nights about it while the data we produce gets harvested . 

I need to get off social media, not completely, it has its uses ,like to promote up and coming events etc, but that’s it basically. In the future I’ll keep my thoughts to myself, except on stage. 

So get off Social media, get outside, go for a walk and have some realtime, with real people.