In the beginning there was Flickr. The year was 2004, and there weren’t too many people online, and Flickr would crash daily around 5pm Pacific, and it was an intimate and beautiful experience.
Then came the trolls, and the marketers, and Yahoo! came knocking, and Yahoo! bought Flickr, and ruined it. And I moved on.
On to Facebook, and Twitter, and LinkedIn, and Google+, and Instagram, and Reddit, and Ello, and Mastodon…
Enough.
Social media has given me countless hours of enjoyment, broadened my horizons, helped me make many new friends. For all this I am grateful. Yet, after thirteen years of very active (excessive, according to family and friends) participation, I am ready to scale back. I am ready to reenter the analog world, eager to rediscover its beauty.
I am not unplugging; email still works on all my devices. But I look forward to spending a lot less time online.
See you IRL.
On the Staten Island Ferry
Mostly Subjective 
Hear, hear ! Be connected but ya gotta lookup at a blue sky with moving clouds – or just looking at the ocean.
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Look at the ocean and *not* think about how to frame the photo and what Instagram filter to use. Just look at the ocean.
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Fair Point. I’ll try and just look more often.
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Life is too short – look around – the real world is fun !
Sent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone
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Luv it AT as we’ve come to expect of u… but u don’t mention, say, Compu$erve or MySpace, young Paduan! Joking aside i have a kess jaundiced view, & managed to keep LI, FB & FT 4 biz, fam/biz & fam resp. I dropped G+ n my 2nd blog but added Medium on 2 fronts – biz and current affairs! But ur right it takes an awful lot of time and I cannot keep up the frequency to generate traction… if that’s a real outcome to start with?! But welcome to the GIN or ‘grumpy old men’ club, not ‘geologist on meth’ LOL
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That’s GOM club #bloodyautocomplete tho gin doesn’t sound bad LOL2
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I was on Usenet, and IRC, and CompuServe, and AOL, and Prodigy, and MySpace… I didn’t mention them because real social media and Web 2.0 began with Flickr, IMHO.
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