Mar 28, 2022 | Facebook, Writing
A month ago I opened a new Facebook account in anticipation of the eventual publication of The Raven and the Hart. It has been a slightly strange experience without being quite as fraught as using my old account which was deleted. The main difference this time around is that I simply ignore a lot of what appears on my timeline. In this I have been well trained by Twitter, particularly during the early stages of the pandemic, when I actively, and brutally, edited some posters and posts out of my timeline – something I continue to do. I’ve been applying similar principles to Facebook.
It helps that I have a reason for being there: engagement directed towards, in the long run, marketing. That doesn’t mean I don’t try and make the best of it, and it certainly doesn’t mean that my activity is cynical and instrumentalist: there is genuine pleasure at reconnecting. It remains the case, though, that were it not for Facebook’s reach for marketing purposes, I would not ever have considered returning to it. Having an overriding purpose helps me to grit my teeth and get on with it, especially since I’ve taken care actively to exclude some things from my timeline so I only see them if I go looking. Even so, I’ve still had a couple of weird interactions with ‘people’ who are either bots or whose accounts have been hacked.
I said somewhere recently that the main Facebook page is OK because I can control it with the ad-block features of my primary browser (Brave) and third-party apps like Facebook Purity. The mobile app, however, sucks like a sucky thing in an ocean of sucks. Not only can I not control the newsfeed, which is algorithm drive, I can’t eliminate the ads either. Despite Facebook’s claim to target the ads with unerring accuracy, in fact they are mostly irrelevant to me – possibly because I lock down ads and tracking elsewhere as much as I can. In any event, I make it a strict rule never to click on an ad on Facebook. Of course accidents will happen, but I remember them because I curse myself for my fat fingers. Interestingly, deep in the crypt of Facebook’s settings is the ability to see ads that I’ve ‘interacted’ with, and there are entries there that I can be certain that I’ve never interacted with, unless you count scrolling past them.
***
As for the forthcoming book itself, I have applied the outcome of the sensitivity review and also have a cover design. This week I’ll be sorting out prints of the current text for a final review and also sending out e-copies to readers for their final comments. I’ll let that drive decisions on the actual publishing schedule.
***
We’ve taken the plunge and booked flights to visit Amy in Michigan later in the year. Fingers are now crossed that ‘world events’ don’t intervene to sabotage the trip.
Feb 25, 2022 | Dead Water, Facebook, Music, Ukraine
I don’t plan to write anything about the situation in Ukraine because there is nothing I can usefully say. So here are some inconsequentialities.
***
The postman finally delivered 5 complete shows from the 2021 Phish tour on CD today (I ordered them in December as a Christmas treat for myself.) Sadly for them, they arrived on the same day as the new Half Man Half Biscuit CD, The Voltarol Years. Sorry Phish, but one has priorities.
***
One of our neighbours has suffered a triple misfortune:
-
- she has injured herself
- she is stuck in Sheffield
- she can’t use her ticket for Scotland-France at Murrayfield tomorrow.
On a similar principle to that espoused by Half Man Half Biscuit on their timeless classic Dead Men Don’t Need Season Tickets, the ticket for the match is now mine. This will be a decent way to occupy my time before heading into town to see Van Der Graaf Generator on what may well be their final tour.
***
A dark day in the life of your blogger, who has opened a new Facebook account. My views on Facebook have been well aired here, they have not changed in the least, and I’m not going to rehearse them again. All I will say is that I have been persuaded that a Facebook presence is a ‘nice to have’ ahead of publishing a novel later this year. It is about marketing – or tawdry self-promotion if you prefer. If you’re interested you’ll find me here: IanBurdonWriter.
A page linking to various places that you’ll find me is now on Linktree.
***
Only two years after others tried it during lockdown, I have been trying to make sourdough bread. Results so far:
-
- Batch 1: 100% spelt flour. ‘Good taste but texturally challenged,’ per daughter.
- Batch 2: 100% spelt flour. Similar to batch 1, but this time I used a baking tin and not so moist a dough so it rose more.
- Batch 3: spelt starter, stoneground wholemeal wheat flour. Would be great had it not stuck firmly to the non-stick baking tin.
More as we get it.
Nov 19, 2019 | Facebook, Music
It occured to me that yesterday was the third anniversary of my exit from Facebook which surprised me a little as I was convinced it was only two years. Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself.
***
One of the earliest records I bought was Gong’s Camembert Electrique. It’s one of those that sticks with you, though these days it’s the cd that I play as the vinyl is gone. I didn’t see them at the time, nor did I see their guitarist, Steve Hillage, in his seventies heydey. I’ve kept up with their doings over the years, as Gong mutated into various outfits and Hillage, with Miquete Giraudy, ventured into dance music with the excellent System 7.
So when, in early August, Hillage announced a tour playing his seventies material, with the current incarnation of Gong as support act and also his band, I bought a ticket immediately. I’ve been looking forward to the show, which was last Sunday, ever since, watching the rave reviews crop up on Twitter.
I’m sorry to say I was really disappointed. The current incarnation of Gong are talented musicians who seem to entirely lack the whimsy and charm of the late Gong founder Daevid Allen, and go in for bludgeoning aural assault instead. Hillage started well, bringing a much-needed melodic sensibilty with his cover of George Harrison’s It’s All Too Much early in the set, and some nice versions of Ether Ships and Salmon Song. But he too succumbed to noise and, after his last tune, Hurdy-Gurdy Man, I left without sticking around for the encore (it turns out there were two of them, four songs/tunes including The Glorious Om Riff which had struck me by its absence from the main set); I’d had enough.
In fairness, a lot of the crowd were ecstatic while others were very appreciative. I suspect it might have been better if you’d eaten a handful of ‘shrooms or sparked up a long one beforehand. But it didn’t work for me. This afternoon I listened to Hillage from 1979 and also to Daevid Allen’s Sacred Geometry IV and all was well with the world again.
Jul 11, 2019 | Dead Water, Facebook, Twitter
I made the move away from Facebook in November 2016. The immediate cause was the last American presidential election and the psychic damage I perceived from the torrent of negativity and bullshit served up to me on a daily basis in its wake. Signal:noise was unacceptable.
I kept Twitter going though. Over time I have taken conscious steps to change what I see. Lately, the guiding principle in editing whom I follow has been to avoid overt political posters and veer towards writers and medievalists. Notwithstanding, I’m seeing more and more of the same stuff that led me to ditch Facebook retweeted into my timeline and thus, not for the first time, I’m toying with losing Twitter too.
I’m hesitating for three reasons: one is because Twitter does have its uses as an information source; a second is that I keep up with some people there with whom I would probably lose touch if I left and I don’t want to do that. The final reason is a bit deeper than those: it is an ongoing process of deciding whether the best thing to do with stuff I don’t like is to isolate myself from it.
The country is turning into a nastier place than at any point in my near-60 years. Our politicians are servile, spinally challenged puppets intent on destroying our economy and the best of our culture in the name of ‘democracy’; our civil society is openly racist and poisonous and infested with the same rhetorical disease satirised by Doris Lessing in The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (which I must re-read soon). Twitter keeps me alert to what’s happening in the way Howard Kirk checked the morning’s Guardian for the latest outrages, but I think Twitter also acts as an amplifier for nastiness because gentler voices either don’t use the medium or are drowned out. My inclination is towards gentler voices.
To what extent would removing Twitter from my life represent a shift back to a more balanced existence and to what extent would it be sticking my fingers in my ears and singing la-la-la?
ADDED: after posting this I remembered that (a) most people I know irl do not use Twitter and (b) of those who do, many use it solely for business related content.
Feb 13, 2019 | Dead Water, Facebook, Linux
Journalist Kashmir Hill recently made an attempt to cut the ‘big five’ tech companies from her life—Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple. She wrote about it in Gizomodo and links to all the articles are here: https://gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-five. Hill cut each in turn for a week then went for a final week without any of them.
By ‘cut out’ I mean she tried to go the whole way and used a custom VPN to block any IP Address associated with the five companies in any of their manifestations. It wasn’t entirely successful, and is probably not an exercise easily repeatable by most of us anyway, but it drove the provocative content of the exercise, and made me consider again aspects of my own life and tech.
The articles are smart, funny, troubling and provocative all at the same time, and I recommend you read them.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer quantity of tech. in the life of Ms Hill and her family. For Amazon there was:
- An Echo
- An Echo Dot
- 2 Kindles
- 2 Amazon Prime credit cards
- Amazon Prime video and TV
- 2 Prime accounts.
We certainly use Amazon, but we have none of the above things, though we might have an old-ish Kindle in a drawer somewhere. We have no Apple products in the house except a 10-year-old (at least) iPod mini that still worked last time I tried it. With Google, I’ve used Gmail since 7 August 2004 when it was still in Beta, and have both an Android phone and tablet. Nonetheless I rarely use Google Apps apart from Calendar. My wife has a Chromebook and an Android tablet and phone.
This isn’t a Luddite mentality; I’ve been around the internet since around 1990, just about when Mosaic came along to make things interesting, and most of the last 20 years of my working life have had to do with eCommerce in one form or another. I’ve blogged since 2002. But I do continually assess my relationship to technology and how much I let it dominate me (bearing in mind I spend most of my day in front of a laptop). As regular readers know, I deleted my LinkedIn and Facebook accounts and now only keep Instagram (@ianburdon) and Twitter (@Cosmic_Serf) as social media—and I’m trying to cut back on Twitter screen time. I use WhatsApp. I’m also ad-blocked to the max and routinely refuse cookies; to the extent I can I block trackers, but that’s a losing battle I think.
I keep in regular contact with four people from my schooldays, and I realised a while ago that I am the only who has ever had a Facebook account, and I’m the only one with Twitter. One of my friends uses an old flip-top phone by choice and I’m not sure if he has a regular email address; he and I communicate by phone or in person.
I certainly do use my phone for pics., for here and Instagram and Twitter, and I have some good, if ageing, digital cameras, but most of the time I use film (35mm or 120) and am thinking of processing my own black and white film again for the first time in decades. I do stream music, but more likely I play CDs in the office and vinyl in the front room when I’m alone. I have a working Creative Zen MP3 player I’ve had since 2007.
I was interested in Hill’s attempt to cut out Amazon; that is the one that ultimately failed because of Amazon’s dominance of infrastructure. By blocking AWS, anything hosted there was also blocked including, to my surprise, Signal. During one week, her devices tried to ping Amazon servers 300,000 times at 3,800 different IP addresses.
I was interested too in the Linux alternatives Hill tried out; I have a couple of laptops running Linux but I don’t use them much. They’re functional but also in many ways a PITA if you want a consumer-level experience or even anything more than that. I have a Linux phone somewhere which I really liked but it fell by the wayside because I couldn’t get alternatives for the few Apps that I do use.
Ms. Hill finishes by saying she’s going to buy a watch. Ironically enough, the decision I took years ago to stop wearing a watch was one of the most freeing things I’ve done. I have a couple of watches that I wear from time to time if the situation requires it, but most of the time they stay in a drawer.
And I think that’s the spirit in which I respond to the articles. I’m 60 this year and I like the differences tech brings to the way I live now. I like being able to have conversations (voice or video) with my sister in Texas and my daughter in Michigan without having to book time on international telephone exchanges. I like the way I can control my bank account balances and transfer money and pay my bills from my phone. But I also remember the internet as it used to be and the idealism we all had back then. I don’t want to rehash things I’ve written about previously (https://www.cosmicsurfer.co.uk/?p=2631) but I do want to affirm that old idealism, which remains my default setting.
Mar 25, 2018 | Facebook
As regular readers (all three of you) know, I deactivated my Facebook account in November 2016. At the time I wrote
The reason I did it was simple: I opened my account up over breakfast one morning, scrolled back through a few entries, and decided I didn’t want to see any more of what was there. I’ve always said I liked Facebook because I could keep in touch with friends and relatives and post photographs, etc., but the scrolling list of memes and stupidity that morning repelled me, especially the political stuff from either side of the Atlantic.
Signal:Noise was unacceptable.
I’ve now taken the plunge and deleted the account entirely. Yes, there will be the minor inconvenience of not seeing some family things, but the 17 months since I first deactivated the account have not led to the sky falling and I haven’t missed it at all. So time to cut it adrift.
Recent Comments