Greetings all. What comes to my mind today is that little box of tricks that sits in your hand all day or the great screen that you may use for more in depth work. Yep, the mobile phone (well, phone is a bit of misnomer, pocket pc would be better) and of course the mighty PC, laptop or whatever device you use in your everyday life.
I will hark back to around the year 2000. Around that time I would have been loitering on the AOL realms and used to be quite a regular contributor to the writers board. I remember once being aghast when one of my stories was pulled for deigning to pollute the realm with an invective or two in the story. Alas, the poor moderator had never heard such workmanlike language and despite my protestations of reflection of everyday life, the story was pulled and would only be allowed to stand if said naughty word was edited or removed. Ah, such sheltered days...
I got into the swing of writing on forums and used to be quite productive. I'd regularly churn out at least 2 or 3 short stories a week and for me it was the joy of creativity that was a real gift to indulge. Then around 2005 the rot began.
Myspace was born and suddenly there was a new distraction. At the time writing was encouraged and I did used to have a blog on there until there was a new interloper. Yes, the Facebook empire was born and like a ruthless Caesar Mr Zuckerberg destroyed the opposition with a seemingly simple idea but a brilliant one.
I was ensnared in the world of potty pastimes such as Farmville, other ville games and my net productive output dropped like a bloated Zeppelin. There was also something nefarious about the whole thing though. Facebook had learnt the secret to stealing time.
How often I would sit at the screen and suddenly think, where has the last 2 hours of my existence gone. Of course, I was not alone, my work colleagues, friends and family were taken by the same affliction. I remember once on a long coach trip to a karate competition, a lady said to me, "Gary, you forgot to water my tomatoes."
Now, no doubt some are thinking, surely this is something that can be done simply with a watering can before she left for the competition. Also, why does she need the writer of this tale to let loose a fountain of H20 when she is quite capable herself.
Ah, but this is the thing. We are talking of the realm of virtual farms. It was Farmville she was referring to and as I had not watered her plants they would shrivel up and her crop would be wasted. What an errant cad I had proven to be.
It was in that moment that I sensed that this madness had well and truly taken hold. I decided I would flee the game and I did. However, there were plenty of other devious distractions waiting to take its place.
Then we have the attack of statuses and memes. There is quite an art to these little distractions and you can easily lose all sense of time and space in a black hole of clicking and sharing. There were so many types (Still are of course) ranging from the funny, daft, angry, passive aggressive, guilt, reflection. I could go on but that black hole is rather gargantuan.
The tragic thing with the meme though is that it stifled the creative talents that lie within each of us. It was so easy to snare people, chuck in a face of a Celeb, a random quote (which probably had nothing to do with them) and watch it go viral. Pure evil genius at work.
The ultimate irony is though, that a well crafted piece of writing would perhaps get the odd like and a popular meme...well that could go to any telephone number you'd care to write down...actually, probably an international one with all those extra digits!
As for the statuses, it would be so easy to start scrolling down looking at all sorts of posts of triumph, pity, loathing, conspiracy, politics, etc. Of course I'd had my share and I'd put all sorts of random nonsense down myself. However, after a while, I decided, hey you like writing poetry, why not do some haikus. I still do that, but I will say the work is all my own and not some random share and it's quite a nice creative process to nail them down into 5/7/5 format. One mistake I did make was to put a few political haikus out there. Eeek, I do tend to have a left wing point of view and a few did incite a few angry faces. However, that was nothing compared to the rage and anger unleashed first by Brexit and Corona.
I'm not going to go down that road but goodness, cyber-fanaticism is a real thing. This leads me to this moment in time right now. I found myself once again, clicking on random notifications and it was a voice inside that said "Stop this nonsense you procrastinating numpty, get busy and escape all this negativity."
In that moment of revelation I understood what my best path was. Some of you may wish to follow or ignore but just use Facebook (or whatever social media)
for what you need. It's actually brilliant to disclose what you wish to do to promote yourself, put up some creative work (your own preferably) and maybe a picture or two but stop there.
Desist from scrolling through all the notifications and statuses and those binary traps to keep you enslaved. Do what you need to and then get out and suddenly you will realise, you can actually live without the F word...well until the next distraction comes along to pin you down.
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