The Generation X Files

I don’t know about you, but I have a love/hate relationship with social media.

I live far away from my friends and family, so it’s a great way to keep in touch but I still prefer a proper chat over the phone.

I evolved with the various sites from Friends Reunited through to Meta.

But, I closed my Facebook account when they started wanting access to the photos on my mobile phone. It seemed too big a price to pay just to keep up with Auntie Mabel’s recipes (or reams of photos of distant relatives’ progeny on their first day at school).

In March of 2014, I joined X (although back then it was still called Twitter) with a very specific purpose in mind.

My mum’s 60th birthday was approaching (I’m sure she won’t mind me sharing that!) and I was racking my brains trying to think what to get her.

I thought it might be fun to get one of her comedy heroes to sign a card for her. She would probably have preferred one from Bruce Springsteen but, unlike the Boss, three of her fave comics had their contact details available on X.

I reached out to all three, fully expecting to never hear anything back. These were bona fide, big boys of British comedy. At my most optimistic I thought maybe one of them would see my message and get their PA to respond.

In fact, all three of them replied to me. Better than that, over the next few weeks, I received a handwritten card from each of them in time for my mum to open on her birthday!

Although she initially thought it was a joke and I’d written the cards myself, she was convinced when I showed her the back and forth of emails and messages I’d somehow managed to keep quiet about for weeks.

It seemed crazy how easily I’d been able to contact them directly. When I was a kid, the best you could do was send some fan mail to a P.O. box and hope for a mass-produced, one page newsletter.

Now, here I was living in a world where I could make a direct connection with people from all walks of life from us normies to the POTUS. From my house. In my pajamas (pyjamas?)!

I was hooked.

But, over time, the whole vibe changed. I was there to read interesting discussions between people and make connections but something had shifted.

By 2017, I could no longer spend more than a few minutes at a time on there. I didn’t always support “current thing” and I’m far too lazy to change my avatar every other day.

Every word in a Tweet had to be carefully chosen if you didn’t want to waste the rest of your day arguing with networks of bots.

It was no longer fun.

My love affair with the little blue bird was over.

I still have an account and every so often I’ll send a Tweet into the void, but my heart’s not really in it.

I joined Gab in 2020 and I have 6 followers so I think that speaks for itself! To be fair, I only signed up to follow a particular writer I like so I don’t really engage very much.

It takes a while to wean yourself from the personalised, algorithmically tailored, dopamine hit but I think it’s worth it.

I’m trying to rewire the reward centres of my brain back to more corporeal things replacing likes with smiles and followers with real world friends.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just nostalgia talking but, I miss the old days where I just used social media for its intended purpose – seeing what former classmates look like.

I started this blog because maybe one day, we’ll become friends if you like my stuff. And even if you don’t, at least for the briefest of moments, we had a human connection and that means more than a 👍 or ❤

Citizen Jane x