I’ve tried, but I’m really struggling with the concept of social media. I know this is hypocritical since I bang on how writers should use these things for promotion to my authors at Immanion Press, but some part of me finds the whole shenanigans distasteful. I can remember when having a noticeboard on the Internet was cutting edge, and this was fine for me. Interested readers could post comments or questions about my work and I could reply. Twitter and Facebook don’t tend to be like this. It seems to me everyone is into spilling their guts wholesale on these media, and really that isn’t me. It’s no one’s business than mine what happens in my personal life and I have absolutely no desire to ‘tweet’ about it. To me, these media are for work and work only. I’ll post links to blogs or interviews, but I’ve nothing else to say on Twitter I want anyone else to know. If I’m going to divulge the slightest thing about my personal life it will be on Facebook or this blog, where I at least get more words to say something meaningful.

I realise these sentiments boot me squarely into the category of ‘old git’, but I’m unrepentant about it. I can’t help but feel our modern world is too accepting of emotional incontinence, not backed up at all by intellectual awareness. For example, whatever my personal thoughts on Margaret Thatcher, and believe me I will not divulge them on a social media site, I’m disgusted by the hot, bubbling outpourings of uninformed people, who for the most part weren’t even alive when her policies made an impact on our country. I have no axe to grind about whether her impact was good or bad, that’s my business, and I really don’t care to argue my politics on sites such as these, but I’m just weary of the more negative human reaction as usual. Have these spontaneously evacuating people no sense of measure or decency for the fact someone just died? Whatever the deceased might or might not have done, is there no compassionate thought for her relatives left alive? What difference does dancing in the street make to any real consequences of political decisions made years ago, possibly before you were even born? The legacy of those times might have left a scar across many people’s lives, but that’s still no reason to throw street parties because one salient political figure of those times has died. That legacy, ultimately, was not down to a single person but a combination of factors, relevant to that era. No one of those times can come out of that bathed in silver light, whatever politically-biased accounts might attest. These reactions we read of now are as much of a human bowel explosion as was the over-wrought reaction to Princess Diana’s death. Mercifully, we didn’t have Twitter when Diana died. Really, social media just allow incontinent humans to spray their motions all over the place. I couldn’t jump up and down in glee, protest, or post obnoxious messages about anyone who died, whether they were a bone-gobbling dictator or a saint. Urgh, reading about this stuff, I need a bath.

Still, all this in itself is grist for the mill in a creative sense. I’m aware that in some ways the world is speeding ahead of me as I grow older, and people killing themselves because of cruelties uttered on a social media site, which ultimately is less worthy than what they might throw out in the trash, is just another symptom of the decline of the world I once knew. Perhaps, in some future scenario all this will somehow be positive, but I just can’t see it at the moment. All I see is a massive open mouth, raw with obscenities, spewing foulness across the ethers. It’s unfair I know. Lots of people just tweet and post about their kittens and babies. They might share wry insights into their life that make good reading (as do many of my friends), but beyond the safe scope of my friends lists I know what goes on out there and it’s often repulsive.

Meanwhile, here’s a picture of one of my cats. Love to you all. *Smiley face*.

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