I am one of the early adopters. One of those people who vehemently signed up to every single online service as soon as they became available to me.
My twitter account is dated December 2006, and I was among the first 100 accounts in Italy.
Many other accounts I have were born pretty much at the same time: late 2006, early 2007.
It was a great time for the early adopters. We felt we were the avant-garde of the so-called Web 2.0.
I’ll spare you the details, but we were wrong on so many things.
One and for all, we were wrong in believing that online conversations and direct interaction were only bringing positives.
We thought that online conversations were the purest form of debate, and the collective wisdom was far superior than any previous form of knowledge.
There were pros, I don’t doubt that, but we dramatically overlooked the cons.
Over time, the negotiated truth, the concept that every opinion matters in the creation of a collective knowledge, allowed the establishment of anti-science movements. Propaganda is stronger than ever. Armies of uninformed people pretentiously want to argue on complicated matters with the experts who spent their lives studying such things. Nonsense.
For this reason, in the last few years, my information diet has changed, and so my online presence has too.
The Twitter account that I used and abused for years, lays abandoned.
With the exception of a few automated services, I almost never post anything there. I don’t even read on Twitter. Too much noise, too little signal.
Facebook is one of those things I open every now and then to keep up with my close friends, and forget about it.
I deliberately quit interacting on Facebook three years ago.
At some point I realized that nobody has ever changed their mind about anything, reading a Facebook comment.
So, why bother commenting at all?
Instagram is a little better, but I don’t engage much.
I still read blogs, trying to post on mine every now and then. I’ll probably try to do it more often and with more dedication going forward.
A couple of days ago, Automattic announced the acquisition of Tumblr. I logged into my account to check things out and while I was there I cleaned it up a little. I removed the old posts with broken links and old content, brushed it up and brought it back to 2019.
My latest post on tumblr was 12 years old. Wow.
If you are reading this post, you pretty know where to find me: here on my blog for the serious stuff, and on my tumblr for day to day activities.
Thanks for reading, and feel free to drop an old fashion comment. I would really appreciate that!
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