While you were sleeping

The internet changed

Man, what happened to Facebook? Remember when you could "like" (without needing to choose between different "hearts" and expressions) a photo of family and friends?

I get it: who doesn't want to pile on Trump for his BS on Epstein, or the CEO who got caught cheating at a concert and hid like a squirrel, or Biden's handlers who plead the fifth for 5 consecutive minutes. That's fun too, and yeah, it can portray a funny "face", but how about the facial recognition of beloved people who are happy? Isn't that what pictures were originally about?

Even all the cultural, theological, political and sports talk that floods Facebook is well and good - but shouldn't there be a medium that's not called FACEbook for all that?

Not just that, but the same sort of upside-down transformation is happening to Substack at warp-speed right now!

Remember when X was Twitter - and when you could just “tweet” something goofy and/or inane and perhaps a handful of back-and-forth banter would follow?

I haven’t used the other platforms too much, but I hear that they’re even more mind-numbing and thought-killing. Is that possible?

Oh, don’t even get me started on LinkedIn: it was quickly destroyed by this transformation and in a less pleasant way, so quickly that I stopped using it promptly.

YouTube? You’d better believe that it went from music and vloggers to “one-stop shop” probably before any of the others.

Why do I bring this up? Well, normally, I complain about how fractured society has become, how specialization destroyed education (and many, many colleges that used to be, broadly, about the liberal arts are now closing - in large numbers), and about how a true jack-of-all-trades is fading from view. So, why would this sort of thing be bad? Wouldn’t King-of-all-trades, specialist-in-everything, and completely unfractured - 100% comprehensive and all-encompassing - online platforms be a good thing?

I don’t think so. You see, WE become more fragmented as this progresses; WE become less like jacks-of-all-trades during this; WE aren’t generalists *or* specialists.

Why would I blame these platforms? Well, you go on there to see pics of friends - and you stay for the rest of the never-ending show. Then, there’s less time to spend on becoming jacks, generalists and “fractured” by the rest of life’s goofiness.

It’s very likely that this is simply an effect of a more serious and deeply-rooted cause, but the fact remains: these platforms have not helped and don’t seem to be helping the recovery.

And here I am contributing to it on both ends...

So, stop reading this and go master something; go dabble in amateur pursuits; sign off. Go outside - even if you’ll sweat or freeze. Embrace that. Don’t get sucked in.