Happiness and Social Media
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Happiness and Social Media

Byrichard

It is the turn of the Washington Post to discuss whether people are happier after leaving social media. As with every other article I have skimmed on the topic it discusses addiction and more without discussing the reason for which social media might be bad for one’s mental health. 


Remember that social networks, discussion groups, and collaborating with people in different rooms, countries, timezones is normal, and has been for decades. What makes social media different from other social networks is that social media is algorithm and profit driven, rather than community centric. 


As I skim through this article I see discussions about self-perception, bullying behaviour and more. What I see is not a commentary about social media, but rather a commentary on the cruelty of normal people on the social web. As I like to say, the problem with social media is that the bullies we used to spend time on the web to avoid, have made their way onto the web. The web is now as unpleasant as meat space, as some called it. 


The article discusses body image and instagram but there’s something that people forget, or never experienced. Instagram was a photo sharing app, between friends and friends of friends. We didn’t share images of ourselves, or if we did it was because we were at events together. Seesmeetups and tweetups were events where we would have photos of ourselves, with others. If we posted images to instagram they were of landscapes, travel and more, not individuals. Body image didn’t even come into it for us. 


I left Myspace because the community left, I left Jaiku because it shut down. I left Google+ because it shut down. I left Facebook because it became filled with adverts and reminded me of the life I wanted but didn’t have. I left Instagram for almost the same reason, but also because I was seeing adverts, without feeling human connections with humans, anymore. 


I left Twitter for political reasons. I don’t like what Musk stands for, but I also hate what he is doing to the platform. 


People love to speak about social media as if it was addictive, and as if it was bad for mental health. They are missing the point. The point is not whether social media is healthy or unhealthy, because at the end of the day it’s just people socialising. If they were in a bar or pub we’d think nothing of it. If they were on a balcony or in a garden we’d see them as just socialising. People have lost sight that social media is a group of friends socialising. 


They think that social media is about likes, views, about re-shares and more. It isn’t. It shouldn’t be. Social media is a network of friends of friends, and to leave the network is to leave behind that network of networks. 


Twitter, Facebook and Instagram destroyed that network of networks, and now they’re trying to fix what they broke, whilst blaming what they broke on personal weaknesses, like addiction. Being social, as I have said for decades, online, is not addiction. It’s normal socialising via a different medium. 

Northern Exposure and Blowing Bubbles
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Northern Exposure and Blowing Bubbles

Byrichard

Northern Exposure is a series about a doctor who finds himself sent to Alaska to be a doctor for a few years. He thinks that it is the middle of nowhere and he has to adapt from enjoying life as a New Yorker to life as a frontier town doctor.  


Early colza in the Canton of Vaud
Early colza in the Canton of Vaud


Although the series is thirty plus years old it still remains relevant today with its exploration of global warming, pollution and more. The characters have existential conversations and in a few episodes we meet the man living in a geodesic dome. He lives in the dome to avoid pollution. He is allergic to aluminium, methane gas and more. 


It’s an interesting episode to watch within the context of the pandemic. People, including me, continue to wear masks when we are indoors. People think that we are strange for doing this. The pandemic isn’t over. We hear all the time about how Long COVID lies dormant, whether people are symptomatic for weeks, months of years after primary infection. It makes sense to wear masks, given that a mask takes a second to wear and take off, but long COVID can be for life. 


Cars coming from Geneva on Easter Friday
Cars coming from Geneva on Easter Friday


The idea of being allergic to the modern world, to various forms of pollution is an interesting one. We read about forever minerals and plastics in drinking water, more and more often, and about air pollution. We have CO2 monitors to keep an eye on pollution. We have maps of pollution around cities, motorways and more. The topic is still relevant today. 


This television isn’t on Netflix or Amazon Prime. It is on Filmin, a film network for experimental films. The content is niche, more diverse and more interesting. as long as you understand Spanish. It has films like Nano of the North, which I find interesting. I know this because when I typed North for Northern Exposure it suggested Nanook of the North, a documentary film I read about regularly when I was studying documentary. 


Modern television series should have people wearing masks to socialise. “Lunatics” like me, who still wear masks, should be normalised in modern television series, to show that being cautious should not be worthy of stigmatisation and prejudice. Northern Explored pollutants in the air. Modern series should explore the reasons for still masking despite the gas lighting of politicians, stating that the pandemic is over, despite the death rate telling a different story. 

On Friends, The Series, Being Offensive
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On Friends, The Series, Being Offensive

Byrichard

Friends is a television series that aired in the 90s and that still makes millions today, as the show is re-aired. Jennifer Anniston, Rachel Green in the series, says that people today find the series offensive today. I find it ironic, that in a day and age where books are edited to be more politically correct, parties that are immoral, are voted into power.


Brexit, the Tories, the UDC and The US Republican Party are two examples. They represent old fashioned views and yet people not only vote for them but they lead politics. In the age where people are worried about what people said and thought decades ago, people are showing more bigotry in who, and what they vote for today.


If we edit books to be more politically correct, and if we criticise television series and films for representing old fashioned views, then we should edit the bible and Quoran, to make them more representitive of modern values.


Television series, films and books represent the world as it was, and if we have moved on from the values seen in TV series, films and books, then that is the entire reason we study them in the first place, whether through english litterature classes, film studies or media studies. The fact that our values change is part of the academic discussion to be enjoyed.


The danger comes not from laughing about something, but about growing angry, and showing intolerance. Remember that joking about something, offending someone by accident, and apologising is one thing.


Brexit and some political parties are about radicalising hatred against people based on race, religion or national identity. Whether Roald Dahl or Friends shows old fashioned attitudes to one thing is an interesting quirk to be discussed by parents, children, and students.


The movement to divide, radicalise and spread hatred is quite another. Until Drumpf and Brexit I felt that England and the US were making forward progress. With BRexit and Drumpf the US and England took a big step backwards, morally.


Complaining about books, televisions and films is nice, but it’s a desire to change the past. What worries me is that the Far Right is thriving in the US, England, Switzerland and other countries. I want people to vote against the Far Right, in government, rather than worry about how people thought three decades ago. What I see happening now worries me. England voted against Europe and the European identity. They behaved in a xenophobic manner and no one noticed.


Rather than complain about television, books, and films people should vote to keep the Far Right out of power. If the Far Right is in power then the very things that people decry in films, books and television, are shaping government policy in the wrong direction. Vote intolerance out of government.

Thoughts On Decentralised Social Media
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Thoughts On Decentralised Social Media

Byrichard

The web was decentralised for a long time. The internet and social networks were designed around different niches. We had niches for people that did sports in the same area of Switzerland, that wanted to discuss a variety of topics, for music lovers and more. The change brought on by MySpace, Twitter, ICQ, Facebook and other projects is that it centralised all those communities so that everyone was in different communities, on three or four social networks.


That centralisation internationalised certain networks, like Twitter and Facebook, although with a heavy US bias. With the decline of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter the implosion of social networks that happened before is moving in the opposite direction. We are going from a centralised to a decentralised social network landscape.


The more I use Mastodon, the more I take long breaks from the “federation”. People are arguing, disagreeing, and in general trying to impose a vision, onto people, rather than seducing them, and encouraging them to think the same way.


I watched an episode of Northern Exposure that deals with racism, bias and prejudice that I appreciate. In the 90s cultural differences and other differences were a source of discussion, and existential questions. People would explore what they felt, and try to find a new way of seeing things, to make them more open minded. People would aknowledge how they felt, and see about changing their views and attitudes, through discussion.


Twitter is swinging to the Right, and there are adverts every fourth post so it has become less welcoming. Mastodon has another related problem. People are saying “if you don’t think this way then you can leave” and “everyone has to behave this way, rather than that way”. I go to social media to have pleasant conversations and interactions, not to be told what, and how to think.


What I want is not a Twitter, Facebook or Instagram replacement. I want to find a new social network, in person, that uses Signal, or another IM platform, to converse with a small network of friends. I am tired of the big social networks that lack social warmth. I want to find a new community of like-minded people. Not easy, when COVID denialism makes being social a risk.

Twenty One Thousand Five Hundred Steps and A Wind That Plays The Harmonica
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Twenty One Thousand Five Hundred Steps and A Wind That Plays The Harmonica

Byrichard

Today I could have taken the scooter to some shops but I went for a walk. The result of that walk is that I reached twenty one thousand five hundred steps. I often take a lot of steps per day. I wish I was walking somewhere more interesting than in circles.


According to Sports tracker my daily workouts saved 4.74 kilograms of CO2 this month.


I was amused during this walk. The wind is so strong at the moment that as I tried to play the Harmonica as I walked into the wind I found that the wind itself was playing my harmonica. If I blew then I won, but if I drew then I was competing against the wind. Boring people get wind chimes. I think that people should get harmonicas instead of wind chimes. Wind chimes are audio kitsch. Harmonicas are not, because they’re rarer.


https://youtu.be/7E9ZljSImGY


This recording is from yesterday’s walk in the wind rather than today’s. The audio was recorded from the airpods, I think. I wasn’t sure you would hear the harmonica over the sound of the wind but it worked.


The wind has to be going at, at least, 25km/h if I remember correctly for the reeds to resonate enough to make noise.


In other news I have read more than once that trawlers are now trawling for krill within superods of whales. I read a few days ago about how fishermen are hoovering the sea of krill to feed farmed salmon. Humans are destroying the sea to such a degree that they are now hoovering up krill, leading to whales and other mammals to starve. We should not be wasting money and fuel to farm something in a juvenile state. It’s bad enough that humans destroy other parts of the marine food chain but this is a step too far.


As a diver people always asked “But what is there to see when you dive” and the truth is “nothing, because of overfishing, in Swiss lakes and the mediterranean. The paradox is that with a marine reserve aquatic life comes back and thrives quite easily. People fly to Fiji and other locations to see plenty of fish but if Europeans, and others, worked to preserve their marine diversity, through marine parks then we would have more fish to see underwater. The marine eco-system needs us to leave it alone, to recover, so that fish reach maturity, so that we see large whales, fish and more.

Twitter, As a Joke
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Twitter, As a Joke

Byrichard

Twitter went down and I didn’t notice, yet again. According to The Verge it has been down five times in five weeks. It goes down so regularly that it feels as if they have allowed the Netflix Chaos Monkey to run freely around Twitter code. They say that they need to rewrite the entire site.


Twitter had plenty of downtime many years ago but these were growing problems that were eventually resolved. It would go for months or even seasons without serious issues. They had learned how to make Twitter reliable. Now that so many staff have been fired the people with less experienced are stuck, trying to understand the old logic, and failing.


They want to rewrite the entire website. I wish them good luck. I don’t see how they can when they’re firing people, and overloading those that are left behind, with work.


“This paved the way for a single engineer to be staffed on a major project — one that is linked to several critical interconnected systems that both users and employees depend on. “

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/6/23627875/twitter-outage-how-it-happened-engineer-api-shut-down


Google Reader, Jaiku, and plenty of services have lived, thrived and eventually been abandonned. Twitter is not something I rely on anymore, so whether it lives or dies, at this point, doesn’t matter.


I am no longer invested in the social network. I am no longer invested in social media, because social media has shown that it is a glossy mag, rather than a social network. Glossy mags are not social networks. They are advert sellers. I loved Twitter. I expect nothing now.


And Finally


I don’t want to use Twitter anymore for the same reason I stopped using Facebook and Instagram. I don’t trust those in charge to be moral. I expect that our data and attention will be exploited. We will be used.


I am not a user. I am a community member. Destroy the community, like you did with Facebook and Instagram, and I will migrate.


My issue with Twitter is not that it goes down, but why it goes down. I also have issue with who owns and controls it. No social network should be controlled by the Far Right, especially when algorithms affect what you see.

The Absurd

The Absurd

Byrichard

Over the last few weeks I have been thinking about the absurdity of life during this pandemic. People are pretending the pandemic is over and falling sick with a disease that keeps them sick for months.


Entire professions are now unstable so finding work is harder.


Millions of others are unable to work.


Living with COVID is absurd. I wish the world would stop being absurd. I am tired of the absurdity of people being okay with living in a pandemic.


I would spend more time writing this blog post but part of the absurdity that I am writing about is that I do not have the space to work towards my personal goals, so my days are absurd. I am in limbo and I can’t change it until I regain my normal life, a life that is not as absurd.

The Environmentally Unfriendly Farmer

The Environmentally Unfriendly Farmer

Byrichard

For several months I was not bothered by the noise of an environmentally unfriendly farmer. This farmer loves to use a really old tractor. He loves to turn on the engine and let it run for minutes at a time, without moving. It is running now, as he fills the container with water and pesticide, or whatever he is concocting. A rational human being would cut the engine when a tractor is not moving, to save on fuel, and cost, and to protect the environment.


Not this farmer. This farmer just turns on the engine and lets it run. There is just one case where I have seen an engine running when a vehicle is not moving. Deicing trucks. With a deicing truck you need to keep gallons of water and deicing fluid at a certain temperature so that they are ready for work, on shift.


A tractor is not a deicing truck. A tractor should be like a car, equipped with start/stop technology, so that when the machine is stopped for refuelling and more, the engine does not run. This would save on fuel, air and noise pollution, and maintenance costs.


I often think that it is a shame that we are seeing the emergence of electric trucks and cars, but no one is thinking of electric tractors. Electric tractors would make sense.


Of all the professions that would benefit from environmentalism and environmental consciousness, farmers are it. If global warming leads to drought they lose their crop. If the air is polluted and precipitation is polluted they suffer. If the soil is emptied of nutrients, they suffer. A few seasons ago farmers asked for the right to keep using petrochemicals on their fields and this made no sense. They asked to have the right to destroy their own environment, and when the swiss voters said yes, they said “thank you”.


Of course farmers have to earn their living, but their behaviour is unsustainable, so farming will become harder, rather than easier.

Muddy Shoes and a Drought

Muddy Shoes and a Drought

Byrichard

Every morning the landscape is covered in frost. That frost melts and turns to water, which in turn, turns to mud, and cakes my shoes. Unfortunately there has been no rain for weeks, and there is no rain expected for weeks. We are in another drought although most people will not call it that, yet. They prefer to enjoy the sunshine and ignore the deeper problem.


This risk of drought is recognised. The RTS wrote about how people are getting water tanks, due to the regularity of droughts. The problem is so bad that aside from the article about people buying water tanks to store their own rain water there is another one speaking about how the underground water table is at risk. “Il faudrait donc qu’il pleuve quasiment non-stop jusqu’à fin mars pour que les nappes phréatiques retrouvent leur niveau normal”. It would need to rain non-stop for two weeks for the water tables to find their required levels.


I miss the rain. I miss the rain because when it rains it feels like a treat to have good weather. I miss the rain because I like the sound it makes on the roof. I miss the rain because it fills the rivers and makes them interesting to watch. I miss the rain because without rain the sky becomes boring. There is no reason to look at the sky, or to look at weather apps when the weather never changes.


One of the most flagrant changes, when there is enough rain, is how the grass and other plants grow, by the side of the road. Paths that were easy to walk along, before rain, would become more challenging to walk along, when the rain has given the plants the water they need to grow. It means less grass cutting, it means fewer plants growing. We’re in spring now, and without rain we will not see plants germinate in the usual way.


I miss bad weather because the pandemic isn’t over, and there is nothing to be gained from the weather being good. Good weather is monotonous.

Repotted Orchids

Repotted Orchids

Byrichard

Recently I repotted Orchids and now they seem to be doing fine. I see evidence of new buds and suspect that they have continued to grow despite my intervention. For months I considered repotting them but I was afraid that it would kill them. I waited until they were between blooms but they’re constantly blooming so that wait was long.


In the end I repotted them when I noticed that a plant was growing and flowering in the air. I found that it seemed to be completely detached from the mother plant. I filled a pot with the wood chips that are meant for orchids, wet them, and then placed the orchid plant within. I did this for several plants and now have four pots with orchids.


In one case the buds that were growing dried up and seem to have died. I spotted new growth though, so I think that they have all survived. If that is the case then orchids are not that difficult to keep. For a while I thought that the orchids were dead because they weren’t flowering or doing anything. Eventually I watered them and they started to grow again.


These orchids are now five years old, or even older than that. Rumours that these plants are fragile are either not true, or my flower keeping habits are right for this type of plant.


And Finally


I set off for one walk but ended up doing another. There is a pond/lake that has formed on a field, and I saw plenty of birds. I decided to walk by the lake/pond/puddle to see what bird life had been attracted. It’s plenty of seagulls.


https://youtu.be/bsOW-vnEzGo


A few days ago this water was frozen and I could walk across it. Now it is populated with birds, until it dries up.