The first question for today: ‘Is there life after Twitter?’ Front-page news the other day at the Toronto Star was that columnist Paul Wells is boycotting Twitter. It is a form of protest. He will forego his 30 tweets per day and his 60,000 followers until Twitter gets its censorship problems corrected to Mr. Wells’ satisfaction.
So welcome to the real world Mr. Wells. Welcome to the Twitter-free universe. This is your chance to get a life. You can walk around your city with your head held high—no longer myopically peering at your smart phone. You no longer even need that weather app; you can look up at the sky. And you can look at the world around you.
You could even be ahead of that guy Trump in the U.S. He has far more followers of his twits than you. He is a braggart and a buffoon and he entertains. Just wait for his reaction in November when he finds there is no app that will get those Twitterites to follow him to the polls.
A few years ago a grandson convinced us to give Twitter another trial. He said that all writers have to promote themselves on Twitter. That was not true. Twitter proves to be a colossal waste of time. If every Twitterite took that time to read a few good books, they would have something interesting to talk about. They would know more about their world. They would know more about people and how they live.
We spent many years of being an early adopter of things technical. The first home computers, the radio telephone in the car before the concept of cells was developed. Boy, did we have the gadgets—usually at excessive cost and then the analysis, report and rejection.
Social media has done almost as much for the Internet as pornography. Both build users. They both repel. Social media is intrusive, dangerous, exploitive, vulgar and eventually nauseating—come to think of it, so is pornography.
So good on you Paul Wells. You might have done the deed for your own purposes but you could be helping free the slaves of social media. Think of all those young people learning to interact properly with their peers instead of sexting. Think of the exercise our youth will get as they go out to explore their neighbourhood without the life-line of a smart phone. They will be the ones looking around them in wonder. They might be seeing their real world for the first time.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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