Steve and I were talking about how depressing the world has gotten with technology. He speculated that if legendary great minds like Einstein were living today, they’d be ReTweeting pictures of Sheldon Cooper with “LOLZ”. My take is that it’s created us to all be the same. We’re on the same sites, having the same accounts, looking at the same things, and discussing the same issues. I hear this word “Connect” a lot and I want to know why people need to connect so much.
Let me first say that I have a private list of people on my Twitter account who I really like and chat with on a regular-ish basis. Don’t get me wrong, I use Twitter. I don’t have big, long discussions with them, or feel like I’ve found a Twitter family in cyberspace. Some people do, and I understand that being in the same career field, or just finding someone with similar interests is good. Librarians like to see what other librarians are up to. I’m assuming from the Tweets I read, that most of them are using a computer all day during the day as well. I’m still not sure how much of the usage can be personal since every place I’ve worked at (which was a public library, a public school, or a government contractor, mind you) didn’t allow us to use computers for personal use.
Anyway, for writers it makes sense as well because we’re sitting at home doing our work at a computer. Free reign! We can find new books to read and have chats about our word count. I like that, especially now that school is out, I’ll probably be on more than I have been recently. I’ve purposely not used Twitter as much this week since Steve’s been home and we had our holiday in the Lake District. We purposely wanted a holiday away from a lot of technology. So, I checked my feed, saw a couple of things I wanted to address when I got home, and that was it. I don’t think I’m missing much by not being online all the time. (I can say that my word count for Camp NaNoWriMo has suffered greatly though.)
There are millions of “writers” now, and that makes me depressed and ill beyond belief. Everyone has a computer now. Everyone has a Twitter account. Everyone thinks they should write a book. Doesn’t anyone else get angry about that? I wish the economy would go back to giving people some jobs so I don’t have to see the garbage flooding sites like Smashwords. Horrible book covers, horrible ideas, and just a wasteland of trash that is masking around as a novel. Yuck. I’ve had enough. There are even auto generated books being thrown into the mix. Makes me want to cry.
I thought about just making a new Twitter account and starting fresh because it’s nothing like it use to be. At first I was happy to find fellow writers, but I’ve just made my short, separate list of Peeps, and left it at that. My however-many followers, who knows what they’re doing? Do I care? Not really. Doing a mass clean-up is virtually impossible because of Twitter’s stupid ratio rules. I can’t even find articles about statistics of how many books are self-published a day, or how many indie writers there are in the world because the internet is flooded with Writer’s Tips! Good grief!
I’m probably one of the only people who longs for a time when people didn’t have to be connected. The people I talked to in email or chat where people I actual knew in real life. This is why I keep my Facebook page. I don’t post my Foursquare check ins to Twitter, because I only want my family and friends back in Florida to know what I’m up to. I love my Instagram because photography is just plain fun for me, but all in all, the addiction to technology is bringing me down in a major way.
Even my new phone isn’t the top selling gadget (a Samsung Galaxy SIII), because I don’t use it as much as I use to. Back a handful of years ago, the idea of sharing and having someone care what I said and did was so exciting. I would love to have that feeling back again, but I think it’s become so diluted with sameness that everyone is just mulling around like zombies, going about their regular business. I even use to get excited about my blog posts. *sigh*
The best Tweet I heard about writing last week was,
Write the next book and stop focusing on social media so much.
Amen to that. And lastly, for motivation to get the heck away from the computer for a while is from our friend Anais Nin,
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
Now, I’ll go share my quotes online and get back to doing stuff.
No comments:
Post a Comment