#whatsitallabout?

Hashtag Whatsitallabout?

Every morning I wake up and turn to The Oracle (my Samsung) to see what might have happened whilst I was sleeping. In the ‘olden days’ I’d have waited for my dad to finish with the daily copy of The Sun to discover if Russell Grant had thought it a wise move for me to have got out of bed at all.  My phone tells me what’s trending: on Twitter, on the BBC news, on a worldwide news network. And then I go to see what’s happening in the lives of those whom I follow.

The idea of following is a peculiar animal isn’t it? For those in professions whose very career depends on knowing the latest hashtag trend, and for those (same) people whose professions they’d confess is their passion, then okay, I kind of get it. It keeps a person in the know, keeps a blue collar above increasingly rising waters. But how does it make me feel once I’ve cringed and despaired through another Boris Johnson interview when a straightforward Yes/No response has been fudged into shapes that even fudge would have a hard time getting itself into, and then alight on a thread discussing the merits of Greggs vegan sausage rolls versus pig-minced sausage rolls?

It’s how I imagine (because I never have nor am likely to feel the need to) leaping out of a plane over a particularly mountainous gorge with a piece of elastic tied to my feet wearing no helmet, might feel. I started up there, feeling all cross and disillusioned with the state of the country and the state of the leader of the country’s hairstyle, having no discernible way of reasoning nor accepting this untenable position, when whooooosh ooooo—ow—wwwwww how’s that artificial porcine wrapped in pastry getting on?

Then there’s *names are changed to protect the… um… well, to protect them* Maxine who’s taken her dogs out in the misty morning and realised just how precious her life is (as she did yesterday, the day before that and every week leading up to that and the years and decades before that no doubt) and Kallum out-training his personal best at the gym, Helena who’s just finished reading *this* book and thinks that all her followers would #lovereading it.  Linda with her flaming locks of recently re-tinted hair and chuckling desire for it to please be Wine O’clock already (oh, she’s a case, that Linda; a case of Merlot) and there’s Rod with his canine pal sitting atop a grassy knoll and deliberating the scan of the world below their vantage point; dog is probably wondering where he can crap next; and who took the photo if Rod’s over there? Then there’s a group of giggling people all leaning in on each other getting the mother of all selfies because who knows when they might get the chance to meet up again, what with their wild lifestyles and the worry of human extinction?

Do we really need to know all of this? It’s like the sort of childlike image I used to have of our Great Creator (called God in those days), perched on a cloud in his flowing robes of shimmering silver- with a face like Father Christmas and a belly to match, gazing down at his flock and watching them go about their lives: being born, starving, murdering, queuing at Greggs, being stabbed, icing a cake… all the usual daily familiars He must be so inured to by now. I mean, I get that the World Wide Web is a fabulous thing. It links us. It connects us in ways we couldn’t have imagined in the seventies. But do we really need to know what every-blummin’-body in the world is doing. Right. Now. ?

My own personal ‘networking’ in those days  (seventies) was mainly in my head. I’d be walking down the road to fetch something from a shop, say, (these days I’d just Prime Same Day it because I can) and if I passed someone I vaguely knew en route, I might nod (remember those nods?) and then spend the rest of my journey wondering where they got those flarey bell-bottoms from and that purple and lime green stripey tank top. When I got back home from my expedition I might then scour my mum’s magazines in the hope that somebody else might be wearing (let’s call her) Janet’s ensemble, and then pout and whine and dirge on about my never having anything fashionable to wear and that’s the reason nobody likes me/calls me names/doesn’t want to kiss me.

However, in today’s world I could discover in an instant a)where Janet is going (Facebook status) b) why she is going there (same) c)where she got her outfit from (others asking her on IG, hashtag links to the company website) and innumerable other unasked questions that a person might be interested in. Janet, if you like, has developed an almost celebrity-like status but all she’s done (in the seventies version, anyway) is walk down the road.

It’s not healthy for the less secure participants in this thing called Life. Because we feel (I’m using the Royal we here) as though we ought to be involved in it; technology being a marvellous thing and all that, but at the same time we are gripped by a fear of not doing it right, properly, or as well as, say the next person in our feed who has at least nine thousand followers and paints pansies on people’s walls for a living. Hang on, so why are ‘we’ even following them then, if it simply serves to provide more insecurity than we started out with?

Networking.

I started a blog aeons ago. Partly because I love technology and the idea of writing something and pressing ‘send’ feels like the equivalent of what the Banks’ children did with their written request for the perfect Nanny. I’m not sure what I thought might come of it (I used to watch too many fillums with ridiculously clichéd endings) but my peers assured me this was the way to go; especially if I wanted to get my writing ‘out there’; write it, ‘send it’, hover insecurely over the statistics of how many have read it, how many are following your blog, and how long they stayed on whichever page; it’s insanity. It’s worse than (perhaps… what do I know) putting a months’ salary on a horse you quite like the name of – not than I condone horse racing, it’s an example; no horses will be maimed in the writing of this sentence – and hoping for the best because you once watched SeaBiscuit.

Now I’ve lost my thread and it’s all to do with the *Gods of the Interweb.

*other Gods are available.