Why do you use social media?

 

Whose idea was social media? It’s one of those questions that if you take it back to its logical conclusion, you’ll soon decide that humanity should not have climbed down from the trees and, probably should never have crawled out of the oceans.

                                         

I, as a human being, do not have any social media presence at all. I do not class the crime writer as a human being- that will come as no surprise to some of you. The crime writer, as far as the public are concerned is a 'creation', and as we have seen recently the name behind it is often not the name of the crime writer at all but the personna of a publicist typing  in a back bedroom in suburbia somewhere.

It’s all a bit weird though. I am old enough to have grown up in a house without a telephone (for my youth there wasn’t a TV, then an old black and white one, then we moved house and the next door neighbours had a coloured Tv and invited ‘the kids’ to their house to watch a programme – it was the Undersea World Of Jacques Cousteau. It kind of blew my mind.)

Anyway, what did we do before the moby? We made plans one week for the next week. Things were rather more organised than last minute. Today, folk call from one side of Asda to the other, asking if it was red or white onions they wanted. Some kind of list may be useful one thinks.

Me, the author has Facebook (recently hacked) and a twitter account. I have no real idea how Twitter actually works, but for both, I think there should be some IQ test before folk are allowed near a keyboard.

And there’s a classification of social media users that I think we could use.

a)       Oh, Woe is me. They take selfies in hospital, lots of tubes, bruises, bits missing. Or the immortal ‘I’ve just been diagnosed with my 23^rd chronic disease. I saw one post where the man had ‘life saving bowel surgery one day, and went out for a ten-k run the next day. He nearly broke the world record. He put it down to mental toughness. Hmmmm.

b)      The Puzzler. ‘You’ll never guess what has just happened to me.’ No, we won’t so we wont even try. Or ‘I’ve just had the most difficult day of my life.’ With no further explanation.

c)       The Selfie king and queen- here’s my dinner, here’s my dinner half eaten, here’s my plate after I’ve eaten my dinner.

d)      The inspirational commenters. ‘If you look at the stars, your feet will never hold you down.’ Whereas in reality ‘If you look at the stars, you will trip over the dog.’

e)      The warrior. Offended about everything.  Absolutely everything.  And if you wrote something that nobody can be offended by, they will be offended by your vanillaness? Vanillality? Your vanilla opinion!

f)        The cat video posters. Enough said. These people offend us dog video posters.

g)       And the humorous.  The sane people on Facebook.

 

Here's my  two favourites from the last week.

Caro Ramsay!!