Glass Clear

Often it feels like I am skipping alongside a clamoring digger.  My squeaky voice not even as much as a chirp against the monstrous roar of our time.  And it is true, the marvels of this generation have mostly passed me by.  It seems that I lost eye contact somewhere around the third to last bend...right around when Twitter entered news broadcasating and when Facebook became the new schoolyard of the 21st century.  

It’s been a while now, but I decided to join neitherTwitter nor Facebook.  With the help of my dear friend Susan, I did however add my soliloquy to those of other bloggers, simply because it cut down on the amount of illegible notes I left on napkins, notebook borders and phone pads.  

Being an admitted technoskeptic, I nevertheless try to understand the underlying momentum of an innovation.  Twitter did indeed come in handy when demonstrators where being rounded up and gunned down across the Maghreb during the Arab Spring.  What happened in Tiananmen Square in 1994, when the Chinese military clamped down on pro-democracy protesters and ushered in another quarter century of icy censorship and political persecution seems much less likely now thanks to social media.  

I also do realise that kids need hide away places where they can meet, chat and act stupid.  But nonetheless I am really really happy, that my kids don’t use Facebook for that.  

All in all, despite an occasional oncoming of geriatric helplessness, I feel more stable where I stand.  I prefer not to follow every whim, because more often than not, they have turned out to be nothing but variations of the old (and rarely improved) theme.  

Online banking may be quicker when it works, but the time one ends up spending securing accounts and figuring out problems that crop up outweighs the weekly walk to the local bank counter.  

Credit cards do come in handy - especially when one travels - but usually we end up spending more than we should and leave a pathetic trail of bad habits visible to a much wider world than we would wish.  

But then, I had to realise that people seem to like being transparent at times.  In fact, in seems that soul stripping (and all other forms) has reached a new level of popularity!    

This, however, also seems nothing but a variation on an old ritual in the old world:  confession.  So nothing new really, despite all the hype.  

Just more money and energies spent