BEMUSED: When Did We Forget That A Web is a Predating Trap?
I am not what you'd call an early adopter. I'd rather snooze while everyone else gets all excited. It took me quite a while to get a smart fone. My contribution to the thing has been dropping the 'ph.' Since I inhabit the hinterlands of Google Plus as my social media platform of choice, I have not made any excursion into the newer offerings, excepting Periscope, and I only go there for live streaming church. Apparently the Evil One resents that, because Holy Ghost powered Christians getting their praise on seems to be the fastest way to freeze the Scope.
See, technology is expensive. I have to stay in my lane. I cain't afford to jump at every new shiny that comes along. Manufacturers, marketers, and news outlets have to WERK, WERK, WERK like Rihanna on methamphetamine to get my click-through. Should content creators entice me with a bogus post about anything, anything at all, woe betide.
It costs real money to access the interwebs, so keep your Candy Crush to yourself. I admit, I became addicted to the farce that is Facebook. I only went there because my then eleven-year-old jumped on the Information Superhighway without learning how to drive, yo. By the time my cousin was telling tales of my unwashed, tomboy youth, and I was rebutting with equally lurid details of the pitchfork-wielding church-wife mob which ran her out of town, I'd had enough. Now I'm there without a friend in the world, and I am perfectly willing to let my circle grow slowly, like lichen on a boulder. The boy is now a young man, and my shenanigans ran him off of there too. I pull up his profile for the nostalgia, to see him as kid, and Bruce's predecessor, Lily. He posted her there after her short life was ended in the middle of the road in front of our house, and so I go to that place on Facebook the way you might find yourself at the cemetery–to recollect and cherish life as it won't ever be again.
There's lots to see on the internet, certainly. Human nature being what it is, it seems that most of us are content to constrain ourselves to a tiny corner of it. Just what interests us at any given moment, you know? It's hard to drive traffic to a website these days! It's even more difficult to ascertain the direction small businesses (and large ones) should take when seeking to attract its target demographic. I wish big brands were more accessible in a "DO NOT MISREPRESENT NASA." sort of way. The numbskull who thought he could spin the space giant's data to serve his own obfuscating ends got served. The rest of the planet got put on notice that NASA pays attention to what people are saying about it, and can throw shade to rival a total eclipse.
Social media has changed politicians' lives, too. The governor of my great state took to babbling on Facebook to try and damage control the mess he has made of the upcoming business cycle.
The man is a knucklehead, and he didn't check with anyone, not Christians (it's like the voting booth, okaaaay??? Once you get in the stall, what happens there is NONE OF MY BEESWAX), not businessmen, not even his cronies–the people who smoothed his path to the Governor's Mansion. Now he is backpedaling, and though it does not seem possible, social media has cast him in an even more unflattering light than his shiny suits and unruly Alfalfa-type hairstyle could do. Would Starr and Springsteen have been able to pivot so quickly had it not been for the internet? They beat Cirque de Soleil ditching their dates with North Carolina. It was a bad business decision, magnified by a gajillion because of the speed and reach of the World Wide Web. Most probably will cost him any shot at a second term, thank God. He can go see what Bev Purdue is up to; do his bit for the flat earth theory by falling off the end of it when his term is up.
Probably so, but I wish some of us had the stones to just snore it out.
