A peculiar attribute of the technological zeitgeist of this decade (whatever we end up calling it in the end, which will likely be either the #MeToos or the Avocado Toasties) which sets it apart from the Nineties and Noughties is that people today are too lazy to actually surf the Internet. There’s no longer an incentive to do the gruntwork of visiting online forums or Usenet, when technology has evolved to a point where people no longer have to actually do anything to get their daily dose of memes. Now the Internet comes neatly packaged directly to the people, in the form of their Facebook timelines and Twitter feeds, to say nothing of the seemingly endless parade of smartphone notifications.
In recognition of Western civilization’s bold new devotion to intellectual sloth, I would like to remind everybody I have left behind the obligitory urine stain on both Facebook and Twitter. Not Instagram, though. Instagram is just one big digital high school. With a very impressive yearbook. Which is fine, except I graduated years ago.
As much as there is to dislike about social media as a whole, one of its useful aspects is as a supplementary energy to an organization’s already existing web presence. Like an appendage growing out of your website, reaching out to fondle people so it can coat their hair and clothing with its juices.
My twin social media appendages have indeed been doing a lot of fondling. I occasionally do this thing where I take an entire chapter from the book and post one page from that chapter a day, on one platform or the other. I don’t do it all the time, and which platform I end up posting it to depends on a complex schedule based on the time of year and the phase of the moon and the current coordinates of the magnetic north pole. But I do it occasionally, and love to drink the essence of the people’s reactions. The concept started on Twitter and gravitated towards Facebook a few months later. I have way more followers on Twitter †, so it’s a useful avenue for conducting grand sociological experiments. The Facebook page was more of an afterthought.
† I somehow gained a followership of over 1000 people on Twitter without being young, female or pretty. In this day and age, that’s an accomplishment.
Five and ¾ Senses 