Skip to main content

Anti-social media – where everyone’s not welcome!

I got so excited by a new App this week, I almost forgot to scowl at people threateningly.

If you aren’t in possession of a Smartphone: a) It’s 2014! What’s wrong with you?! b) It’s probably time to put the wireless on to warm up, make a nice cuppa and grumble about ‘kids these days’.

The App, called Cloak, combines that well-know tactic of trying to avoid people you’d rather not see (exes, your boss, that newspaper columnist with unbearably loud shirts and receding hairline etc.) with cunning technology, and a very healthy dollop of good-old fashioned cynicism.

By utilising other Social Media applications used by those you’d rather avoid, it can figure out where they are and alert you to the fact that they’re getting perilously close, thus allowing you to hastily vacate the scene, before you get into a nasty round of having to smile at someone and pretend to be interested in their kids/hobby/near-death experience or love of TV ‘talent’ shows.

As someone who now has an office in a separate building to the rest of the organisation I work for, I heartily approve of such innovate, clever and downright twisted use of technology. I can comfortably spend an entire day without seeing another human, get tons of work done without interruption, plus I don’t have to listen to (and feign interest in) what everyone did at the weekend, politely agree with someone who I think is an idiot, or make anyone else’s coffee.

I think there’s definite scope for taking this further. For a while now I’ve thought Facebook’s ‘Like’ button should have a countering ‘Dislike’ option. In fact, why can’t this be expanded to everything on the internet? Or even into the real world?

Imagine how liberating it would be to listen to the first 10 seconds of someone on a Monday babbling “So, anyway, Mr Tibbles (that’s my cat’s name) had to go back to vets because he ate a spanner, and the bill came to £75! And it was only a small spanner too! I think...” before pressing ‘Dislike’ and getting on with the really important stuff – like feeling smugly superior and wondering why you’re being forced to work with these buffoons.

Another useful idea along the lines of Cloak is my concept for a notably irritable version of twitter. In this, doubtlessly hugely profitable, anti-social media world (which I’m calling ‘squawker”) tolerance and politeness are vanquished.

All ‘squawks’ must feature content devoted entirely to grumbling about things, pointing out inadequacies in the way the world is run and governed, deflating the egos of celebrities and sports stars through well-reasoned but cutting criticism, and pictures of kittens. The latter needs to be there, as I think that’s what powers the internet.

There will be no room for cheeriness, asking how people are, or general merriment. Conversation will be kept to a bare minimum, and then only used to agree with a fellow squawker how hideous everything is.

I’ve just described my twitter feed, haven’t I? Gah.

This post hopefully first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 28th of March 2014. I say 'hopefully', as it hasn't shown up on their website yet. A similar situation arose last week, with my MH370 story eventually turning up online on Monday, where it was remarkably still not out of date.

(Compilation CD? Of course! Another home-made one, with some ELO remix stuff, and some more splendid mashups by GoHomeProductions, including the fab Sixxmix.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...