Technophobia 8

It’s January 2021 and Hilary Rose in the Times praises Harry and Meghan for giving up social media because it's pointless and ghastly – she knows because she’s never used it.

It’s 2021 and people are still talking about social media as if it was somehow contaminating. From someone who says he has “simply no use” for Facebook: I joined to have the occasional look at things I can't look at otherwise, entered the minimum personal info I could - and then edited out what had been put there for me. I am not interested in it in any other way. (He started off saying he never used it and wished the subject to be closed. Now he says he looks in once a week to catch up on people’s news.)

But sometimes a friend who has been on Facebook for years, posting the occasional picture of their child or political petition, suddenly realises you can chat to people and starts posting long updates about their lives and engaging in conversations all over the place at great length. (And generally sharing what people used to write in letters to friends.)

It’s 2020 and Matthew Parris is bragging that he’s never used Twitter.

It's 2021 and there are still Facebook posts and websites that are a huge block of text with no paragraphs. You're probably typing on your phone, but please break up the text with line spaces. And on web sites, use large type and leave white space either side.

I genuinely think that some people (read as: 60+ year olds) do not realise how public their comments are on social media. (Via Twitter. Some FB and Twitter newbies say “Why are you posting on MY PAGE?” if you reply to them.)

It’s nearly 2021 and I told someone on Facebook how to copy and paste.

It’s Dec 2020 and I’ve just told someone how to create a Twitter thread by replying to their own tweets.

It’s 2020 and someone on Twitter is asking how to turn off grammar-checking in Word. This is where I came in!

It’s 2020 and some people don’t know they can resize windows so that you can see, eg, email and a Word file side by side.

“I closed the tab and now I can’t find the link on the website again!” Apparently it is common to keep 100s of tabs open permanently, instead of bookmarking web pages you need to return to.

It’s 2020, and Fullfact.org explains that putting text in double quotes will bring up only those pages where the wording matches exactly. This has been a feature of search engines since the early 90s.

I would stand behind someone who’d “highlighted everything by mistake and now it’s disappeared and I didn’t save it” and say “Don’t touch anything! Don’t touch anything!” They carried on hitting keys at random and lost their work.

People are still pushing the line that “likes give you a dopamine hit”. They think this means social media is addictive and you should be somehow ashamed of liking being liked. I’ll never understand Protestant guilt.

You don't keep up with technology that affects your job, so you can’t foresee that in a few years it’ll be possible for the company to shut down satellite offices and run the operation from overseas – when it happens you're terribly surprised. In the 80s, many journalists were amazed to find they were now effectively typesetting their own stories, and there were no longer printers in the basement. And when technology makes you redundant from your job operating an antiquated system that “runs on hamsters and steam”, you are simply astounded.

I just checked out a new coffee shop. At the register, there's a sign that says there's no wi-fi so that customers "make a friend." It worked! My new friend is a different coffee shop. (@legogradstudent)

Every so often an academic or novelist rants that some technological innovation (biros, Twitter, word processors, the electric telegraph) is going to destroy novel-writing, letter-writing, conversation, civilisation, life itself etc many years after it is such a part of people’s lives that nobody notices it any more.

Why is everything a hashtag these days? (Arthur Smith, Money for Nothing. Because Twitter has been around for 15 years, Brian.)

In the 80s the entire concept of “ignorance” was rendered unthinkable. Because you couldn’t give people orders, information was also tainted. You couldn’t even tell someone how to knit. No wonder 80s types had such trouble with computers. All opinions of them are not equally valid. And you can't manipulate them. If you got it right, they worked; if you didn’t, they didn’t. Computers came with thick manuals which people refused to read. I was told "Don't read the manual, it'll only confuse you". What do you think I did? But somehow all this idiocy went out of the window when anyone wanted to learn how to pass their driving test, or take out a mortgage. (They also feared computers might put people out of work. Some lost jobs – but others acquired them.)

Desk chairs are one of our best sellers. Everybody’s got a laptop, and they need a comfortable chair. (Salvage Hunters, 30 years after special “ergonomic” chairs were recommended for computer use. The typing chairs we already had were perfect for the task, oddly enough.)

What happened to all those products designed to “protect” us from evil computers – like the lightweight chainmail shirt for pregnant women? The tinted glass shade you stuck over your screen because the green letters were too bright and you couldn’t adjust screen brightness?

A lot of the arguments against phones at the table were also applied to books when I was young, and a lot of the arguments about snapchat filters etc were applied to women's magazines - at one point the source of all evil. (LW)

More here, and links to the rest.