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| Artwork by Tarek Chemaly |
Sigh. OK, let's start backwards, I joined Facebook so late to avoid reading people's corny posts. By late I mean very late. Also, I discovered a loop - only "friends of friends" can add me as a friend, so I added one friend and deleted him, so basically my profile is ghost and only serves to manage the official page of this blog there. X? I follow no one. Instagram - 26 people - but basically lost most of my audience when my account got hacked. Linkedin is a different story, I used to enjoy there. Now it is just a dump of all the facebook cast-offs.
I admit though, even if the amount of people I follow on Instagram was very restricted I used to love scrolling and just calm my mind from the different causes of stress in my life, which not only all Lebanese face, but also have some very specific to my life. It was an escape and a release. Bit by bit though, with everything becoming video and AI, the compulsion to numb my brain started becoming irritating. As I try to find the latest posts about retro toys, or the broadcast of the newest men's Prada show, I had to endure an enormous amount of senseless videos, erroneous information, a lot of interjected threads stories (mostly written by AI) and so on.
So all in all, whereas I was very sheltered - no Facebook friends, no people to follow on X, relatively few additions to my Instagram original feed, and - what otherwise was pleasurable posts on Linkedin... Now I am suffering from extreme social media fatigue what's with everything becoming clogged with extra unneeded information.
I own a very old iPhone 7SE (yes, I know i must change it but I keep delaying that), but it also has two screens one after the other - yesterday I moved Instagram to the other unseen page to avoid seeing the app and (absent-mindedly) check it. Also, I own a one-thousand plus book strong library of which about 600 were already read. I took some extra books. I may or may not read them but at least my OCD personality cannot notice Instagram and be triggered. As for Linkedin, sadly the people I love to read there get lost in the new algorithm offering me posts I never signed up for. I just checked as to how many people I unfollowed and the list is humongous but the new algorithm just keeps spewing posts from people I never signed up for.
There's too much lecturing, too much drawing conclusions - either on Instagram or Linkedin - from facts that never align. Sure like with anywhere, there is a very interesting amount of information, the problem is now finding it and sorting it when there is little time or patience for that.
I am truly suffering from information, or rather useless information, fatigue.
Someone offered my a copy of Ulysses by James Joyce a long time ago. I shall begin to read it in earnest "I will yes" (if you know you know).