On Social Media

#signalflare with a carpenter bee https://eefalsebay.blogspot.com/2019/03/false-bay-garden-in-march.html Perhaps we'll meet again on Openbook?

Sigh - now we are counting down - my sidebar notifications light up red, with a counter.

#signalflare This might be the last blog post I can share on G+. Depending on which day the sun sets. https://eefalsebay.blogspot.com/2019/03/false-bay-garden-in-february.html

Can no longer remove people from my circles. Particularly ... cannot remove from my sight people who have removed themselves from G+. Account deleted but the zombie still lives in my circles.

On my side of the divide, deleting posts from my G+ which I don't need digitally archived anywhere. Digital detox. Time to move on. Maybe start fresh when the lab rats have sorted the teething problems? Originally shared by Grace Monte de Ramos Some food for thought to go with the G+ shutdown and its attendant chores -- retrieving data, keeping friends, holding on to memories... "Then it dawned on me that one of the super powers of social media or the internet at large is that it messes with our natural coping tendency to forget. Now, there is always a way to retrieve stuff. All stuff. If you can’t, someone else can or will. Forgetting is so much harder now. Every email, notification, alert, pop-up, widget is on a race for you to remember. But our brains have not evolved to make sense of everything, of every view possible and still have balance. So we buckle and we settle or we go mad or we contemplate it and write a piece about it so that we can move on or at least feel like ...

I have been worrying about servers melting the polar ice caps and global weirding since I landed on social media fluff. Infinitely more so when, in a time of minimalism and decluttering, people are determined to move every last little scrap of dead G+ to a new home. Time for a digital detox. For me certainly. Cape Town's electricity is mostly from polluting coal-fired power stations up north. We have been tipped back into loadshedding, and hugely grateful that pumped storage hydroelectricity can usually scrape us thru. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html

I am struggling with the idea of Takeout. YMMD and it surely does. But I have been scrolling back thru my old posts. Discussions around links to sites that are now dead ... those posts I deleted. Discussions where I am talking to myself, because the other half of the conversation has vanished ... deleted. Posts that got no engagement then, why would they get engagement if I dump hundreds of antiquated posts on new social? I am deleting most of my old posts. Maybe the last few I could try a tiny Takeout.

I have followed respected advice to keep my own blog running. G+ was different, but not where my content is. https://eefalsebay.blogspot.co.za/

It was thanks to conversations on G+ that I found Feedly to replace Google Reader. One of the good things about G+ was stepping out of my filter bubble - so not remotely interested in moving everyone I follow to somewhere new. But a fresh start? Maybe. Will lurk.