create a story

… on facebook.

Everyone on facebook has seen that “Create a story” push. Well, I am not much for creating stories on social media. Short reports have had to do, and over time Facebook has gotten old, same as me.

In my mind there is a rather big difference between telling and creating stories, and, unless which flavor they are is made clear, I rather pass. Facebook is mainly smalltalk between more or less likeminded people anyway, so not much is lost by reserving the time for other matters.

I am otherwise all for telling, and reading, stories on any subject, and I use this and other sites to spread mine in case anyone is interested. Some of my stories are serious and some less so, depending on what they are all about, and most are written because I like to see what my thoughts look like and if they make any sense in print.
Conclusion, so far: sometimes they do.

made-up stories?

As apparently most social media users do, most of the time I only sweep through headlines to see if something catches my attention. Thus, no point in judging the quality of all the stories I personally have not looked into in any depth.

People have opinions, and it is important to have open channels for presenting these to a wider public – free speech, etc. I am not sure if social media platforms like Facebook are at all suited for free speech, but it can be worth trying out for those who do not have access to all that many real alternatives. Whether stories are real, or not, is at first glance not all that important.

Maybe unfair to leave the question about overall story-quality open like that, but statistically only a very small number of stories on social media are unique. Most are repeated launches of the same stories, jokes, YouTube clips, etc., and there is no need to go through them again regardless of how good they once may have been.

Stories of a social or funny nature rarely ever catch my attention, so how many that are made-up and how many that are real is something I know next to nothing about. S.c. “fake” stories are most likely in high numbers out here, but who's counting.

skipping on the details…

Those who choose to cast a wide net across social media and ignore most details, will be able to sense their societies' deeper currents as they are expressed on the internet, without having to spend much time on digging up facts or scan for conspiracy theories.
That is about the best description I can give for how I “exploit” social media and other “news” and “information” channels available to me for useful stuff, without being all that active on any of the platforms.

Getting hung up in details, opinions and/or personalities, would be a serious waste of time in any case. Too many details to sort, opinions are just that, and most on-line personalities and their stories are not entirely real anyway. And it is all so very, very, old and outdated by now.
The broader picture is always more true to the facts at hand, as the more people who discuss, react to and describe what they think is going on, the more facts will over time slip past them and into the big picture for those of us who can be bothered to check it up. One just has to remember that nothing has to make sense to be true … or to be pure crap.

sincerely georg; sign

Hageland 05.feb.2021
last rev: 20.feb.2021

whose business?

I am OK with FB “asking”, but what's really on my mind is of course nobody's business but mine. A little self-censorship has never hurt anyone, me thinks, and most social media users seem to have grasped that simple concept well enough for comfort.

Always some who do not seem to have much self-control on social media, but they do for the most part only harm themselves. A pity, but hopefully they too in time will learn digital self-preservation.

One way or another, or maybe in many ways at once, people (at least try to) create their own on-line personas, which they attempt to sell to other on-line personas as the real themselves. How close to or far from their real-world personas their on-line variants end up being may vary, but few human beings are all that real on or off line anyway – unless they lose that all-important self-control…
But that is none of my business.

nothing new today either?

Long lists of stories today, but nothing new or attention-grabbing. Wasn't any worth my time yesterday either, so not much of a surprise.

Still, the overviews – headlines if you like – tell me about any distractions, trends and what not I do not have to be bothered with unless I really want to, which of course is very useful to know.

another turn?

I feel that I am starting to sound like a broken record, repeating myself, which always is a risk for us humans as we're getting older. However, not only do I personally seem to be a little broken by age, but so do the entire on-line social media platform concept in my view.

Now, am I just being bored, or is there a digital variant of Alzheimer's disease slowly spreading throughout the internet?
No evolution anymore, just a lot more of the same stuff that we have been sort of force-fed with for more than a decade? How many more “social media” variants, apps and channels do we need before we realize that the entire “social” idea in the virtual spaces that make up most of the internet, is more than a little passé? And that only the business layers of it are real?

Maybe 25 years on-line is enough, and I should just call it quit?
Would be liberating…

Not always good to see that things are going back to normal.