Back again. And why?

The initial post or two in the revival will be chatty because I have a lot on my mind. However, the longer I go without saying anything on Facebook (even “liking” anything) the easier it gets. I want to take one thing away from Facebook once I've vented, and that is brevity.

Why am I leaving? First, there was some activist attempt to gin up sympathy for people who had taken over a public wharf in my town and were being told to push off. The suggestion was that they were poor downtrodden immigrants, or poor widdle kids who couldn't go fishing with Daddy. They were immigrants all right, and would have been more than welcome if they hadn't made a godawful mess, hadn't shoved off the real neighbourhood kids who have been swimming off this wharf since forever, and if half or more hadn't been unlicenced professionals trying to cut out the licenced fishermen, whom they also tried to shove off.

I was pleased to see that the campaign was over almost before it began, but it was a classic example of how Facebook, by paying no interest to accuracy, encourages such nonsense. There's nothing like having a personal acquaintance with an issue to show up how worthless is most social media content.

Second, about a year ago I began observing the conflicts (can't call them debates) over organic vs. bio-engineered food. I waited to see which side won me with evidence and style. Those sceptical of organics and supportive of biotechnology won me over with evidence and had a slight edge in class. But my interest inevitably (on Facebook) got me tagged as a potential follower of some of the more toxic pages on the other side. When I politely asked a couple to get my name off their lists, I was inundated with hate mail, and trolled for a while until the fools lost interest. Fortunately, they have the attention span of a dog in a wood full of squirrels. Third, I've been trying to aid my mental health by limiting my exposure to news, and I found that exposure to social media was having the same negative effect on me.

Finally, I was trolled for a perfectly benign bit of humour by one of my own relations, whose sensitivity presumably had been honed to a sharp edge by excessive exposure to social media. That's when I said “fuck this.” So I'm back here, in what is generally my personal echo chamber.