Comments by "Cinderball" (@cinderball1135) on "I'm Considering Leaving Social Media Forever" video.

  1. I am on Facebook, albeit reluctantly. It's something I was never keen on in the first place, but friends insisted it was the best way to keep in touch with them. It has categorically failed at that job. Most of my Facebook friends are not people I could write to, and expect a response. And yet instead of politely forming a line they are there to remind me, every day, and it adds to the loneliness that being online made me feel through my teenage years. What's more, the things I learn about people on Facebook are largely things that damaged my view of them as people - things I never really wanted to know about them - things which it would've done me no harm to have never learned about them. Do I really need to know that my Mum's old friend now supports UKIP? Do I need to hear my uncle expostulate on the normalcy of online pornography? Now, I only use Facebook to communicate with one specific group of people, because the leader of that group insists on using Facebook as the principal way of distributing necessary information to us - but I don't read notifications, I don't view my news feed, I don't share, I don't like, I don't comment, I don't follow. If I could persuade everybody to transition back over to pure email, I would, but I think people's attention spans are now so shortened that it would do little good. I had a friend over to visit at the beginning of the year, and she lives far away, on the other side of the country. Half the time she was here, out came the phone, checking Facebook messages (which were empty 75% of the time). Facebook and social media are a plague, memes are viruses, and I wish we could rekindle the dying arts of genuine conversation and quality study time.
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