Today was a fasting day: Water, Coffee, Water, Coffee, Tea, Diet Coke (sorry), Water, Rooibos, Tomato Juice, More water!
Some people (they know who they are) have accused me of hypocrisy under the dubious pretext that I have been less than flattering about facebook and social media generally and yet here I am writing a blog. I'm afraid I have to respectfully (only because children may be reading this) disagree.
Let us do an objective comparison of the 2 mediums:
Some people (they know who they are) have accused me of hypocrisy under the dubious pretext that I have been less than flattering about facebook and social media generally and yet here I am writing a blog. I'm afraid I have to respectfully (only because children may be reading this) disagree.
Let us do an objective comparison of the 2 mediums:
- Posting: Posting to facebook is ridiculously easy. You see something on the internet, you take a photo, someone sends you a video, you see something somewhere else on facebook, you see its someone's birthday and hey presto a facebook has been created. A scientific study (carried out by Cambridge Analytica) of all facebook posts in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Papua New Guinea showed that 97.3% of Facebook items required less than 2 mins of brain activity to be posted. Compare that to a blog entry which requires extensive work. You need to find a subject, do some research, polish your writing, decide on the appropriate length, hook your audience form the start and ensure they stay with you to the end. One is a bag of sweets (candy for non-english speakers) and the other is a three course meal.
- Reading: facebook is all about instant gratification, no focus is needed, your feed constantly bombards you with notifications and reminders of the fascinating activities of your "friends". And it changes all the time there is always something "new" on facebook, ideal for our a time where government policy is communicated by tweet! On the other hand a blog is static it changes at best once a day sometimes less, you have to go to it, its an effort to find it and then it requires actual reading, possibly even thinking depending on the subject of the day.
- Validation: facebook thrives on neediness. You must have lots of friends to ensure that your activity is "liked" and conversely that there is sufficient activity in your feed to keep you interested. If you blog you have little feedback other than a (too) rare comment, there is no "liking" involved. Same thing for the reader you may occasionally share a post with a friend but that is on a one to one basis with no real feedback mechanism on how it was received. One medium is the equivalent of going to the mall with your friends and the other is curling up at home with a good book in front of the fire.
I trust that this has clarified any misconceptions. Dear readers you may safely keep reading in the knowledge that your attention and data will not be sold to dodgy politicans and you will not be targeted by russian trolls.
Cpociba
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ReplyDeleteFab, I've thoroughly enjoyed reading your blog thus far. Hostiles was particularly slow but you redeem it by beautifully breaking down what forms the je ne sais quoi of westerns. Your appropriate switch to french when talking about your groceries makes me laugh, your "fresh from the river" inside joke transports me to your dining room table. I sometimes think about that homeless lady you helped out and wonder what she's up to now.
ReplyDeleteA true three course meal indeed. Looking forward to the posts to come, and hoping I don't lose track. Best, R-b-n
Totally agree about facebook. But advice for those out there who are sick of facebook but aren't quite ready to make the leap of erasing it yet, a tip:
ReplyDeletede-activate everyone on your news feed. This way, you can use facebook as purely an address book and event calendar (You may need it if, for instance, you happen to practice Capoeira and need to keep informed about events) without having to see what people are eating and how amazingly boring their over-documented hyper-saturated lives are. (Obviously, they would not be posting about it if they weren't bored).
Tomato juice isn't quite fasting. I fasted yesterday and had water, coffee, water, water, water, 'Mambé' and 'ambil' with an amazonian shaman (look it up), and more water.
17 calories in a glass of tomato juice
ReplyDeleteAnd if I may add...looking good 👋
ReplyDelete