I started using social media around 1992 when it was mostly a curiosity of those who were ordained computer nerds. My poison of choice was IRC, (Internet Relay Chat), a finnish invention originally intended for deaf children to communicate with each other. As so often happens the idea grew beyond its intended purpose and IRC became a popular platform where people would meet and chat about pretty much everything. A number of IRC network sprung up and some but not all were thematic but mostly they were generic. The way IRC worked was simple. You logged with a special client, chose your nickname and then started wandering around the endless amount of channels which in more normal speak would be chat rooms. These channels were highly thematic, ex. #politics, #europe, #sex, etc, you get the gist. Once you found a channel to your liking you joined the channel and started chatting. Easy enough and since everything was in real time the conversations were real enough to form a kind of social structure with people having different roles, the most notorious one the mod or moderator who had the power to control access to the channel, silence people, kick them out or ban them from the channel. In other words a hierarchy like we experience daily in our real lives. So far so good. I fell in love with IRC and would eventually find my place in one of the networks and chat away for hours on end. Soon I created virtual friendships with people and some of them would eventually become my good friends and a few of them I would even see in real life. Those were good times and I spent a lot of time on IRC, probably too much in the hindsight but it was new, it was exciting and most of all, it was a lot of fun. It didnt hurt the internet revolution was starting up in full swing so times were wild. I would in the end spend several years on IRC and be involved a lot in some of the channels. But as much fun as it was reality crept in and sometimes in unpleasant ways. You see, we live in a physical world and most of our time is spent there and it is essential for living a life and as time passed it slowly but surely dawned on me that this exciting and fun virtual world wouldnt substitude the real one. After all, the virtual world existed mostly in my head with a computer screen as a connector. I started to get bored and IRC lost its luster. Evenings on IRC went from mind-blowingly interesting to be run of the mill events with rince and repeat happening every night. I guess there are finite things to talk about when the only in and output you have is a text terminal. Even the private talks I had with my friends became gray and empty. It turned out most of them werent real friends, they were just names on a screen and I realised I didnt know anything about most of them. Not enough to make it interesting in friends terms. So it was at the dawn of the infernal Windows 98 I said farewell to IRC and the many people there. It was surprisingly hard. I could feel real connection with a few people and I missed them badly but I just couldnt cut it anymore. I did however take the experience of a digital social life with me and it would come in really handy later but thats another story. So here I was without social media and generally just happy with that but being a terminal IT nerd I never stayed far away from the budding world online. I watched as social media web sites started popping up and observed them become the rage of the day and saw the same reach fever pitch and then disappear again. I wont name any names but lets just say, during those times there was a lot of social media web sites. They are all but gone now save a few which lurk in the background married to the age group which got high on them and decided to follow through the years. Now, where was I, yes, a computer geek without social media. As the years passed and various companies experimented with different forms of social media there was one rising the faster than everybody else, Facebook. I guess we dont need to spend a lot of words over the origins of Facebook but it shot up in the IT night sky like a super rocket and would become arguably the dominant player at that time. Everybody flocked to Facebook and it seemed half of the world was there daily. I watched from afar, read about it, talked to people with accounts and eventually I would start getting the question, "Are you on Facebook?" often enough that I concidered creating an account and in the end I swallowed my pride and did exactly that. It seemed fun enough in the beginning although it irritated me to no ends that Facebook referred to strangers as friends just by following them. Who were these people, not my friends, not by a long shot. Some fancy profile pic and a couple of words in the bio but not my friends. Thing is, people dont realise this but Facebook is responsible for redefining the word friend from actually meaning something to a meaningless note on your screen. I guess its all about psychology, having many friends makes that fussy gut feeling and so on. But there you go and soon I "befriended" hundreds of people and then thousands of people and it seemed my Messenger never had a moments peace. So many people to talk to and about so many things. I was drawn to this like a moth to a fire and eventually spent hours every day befriending new people and talk to many more. And yes, it gave me a warm fuzzy gut feeling. I had tons of friends and all of us were important. What an amazing time. I didnt post much myself, rather scrolled and found new and interesting people. But as fun and interesting it was to have half the globe on my phone something was off. I couldnt help but feel all the hours I spent on Facebook somehow werent quite about connection and friendship. I think part of it were the infernal ads and also that people didnt have too much to talk about. Apart from the chat about the day people were mostly annoyed, angry or both and it soon dawned on me a lot of them were enraged by Facebook. I found that interesting because at least on the outside it was all about the warm fuzzies but once you got on the inside there were endless angry and more than often hateful posts. Anger, it seemed, was the main driver of Facebook and the "friendships" were a distant second. Obviously it didnt go well with me and I started to find it increasingly difficult to use Facebook and the thousands of "friends" I had became faceless names which I didnt really know. I think deep inside me something rebelled against the idea that strangers could be friends. And so it went the same way as with IRC. One day I stopped using Facebook, created another account, got a few of my real friends over to it and shuttered the original account. I havent looked at Facebook in years and I dont really miss it, especially the endless stream of discusting ads. It all seems so much american fake and as I understand from my daughter who is a digital socialite, Facebook is basically a gathering of older people now who stew in their own anger and hate. So here I was, older and again without social media. Mind you, I dont count Signal and Whatsapp as social media, at least not the way I use them. I keep those dear to me close with these apps and save thousands on phone bills, (who uses phone anyway). It did feel great to be without Facebook and social media in general. Maybe its me but at that time Twitter had started its run and become popular and as influencial it would eventually become it never caught my interest. I guess Im not that kind of person who laps up every word anyone writes and am ready to take it as some kind of truth. Just because people say something doesnt mean it is either true or has to make a lot of sense. In any case, being off social media didnt bother me and life went on. And then it happened. Tiktok exploded into the scene. Yeah, it literally exploded. I remember reading about this latest and greatest in social media early on but it didnt interest me much. Yay, a video blog site with short videos, I mean, vloggers have existed forever. But Tiktok took off and became immensly popular and in fact so popular in USA there is this persistent rumour Meta had a had in trying to take it down. True or not, the Meta overlord didnt take kindly to Tiktok and for some strange reason american politicians repeated his words and started what could only be described as a smearing campaign but thats a separate story not told here. So, yeah, in the end I got interested in Tiktok and promptly downloaded the app, created an account and jumped in. Now, Tiktok prides itself of having a special algo which adapts to your scrolling habits and sure, it didnt take me long to train it to my liking with the excemption that there was an overrepresentation of american tiktokers and american content which annoyed me a lot cause frankly, the american content on Tiktok to me is both stupid and so incredibly angry and hateful. And soon enough I was scrolling Tiktok for at least an hour each day. It was hypnotic. Endless fun of videos about pretty much everything and people making all these cute videos about themselves. Tiktok on the morning train, Tiktok on the evening train, Tiktok at home. I soon became kind of a Ticktok junkie and I felt good. It buzzed me every day an it was swell. But it didnt last for too long. Soon I felt no buzz but a craving for scrolling on Tiktok and only when I was scrolling I felt ok and I didnt like that one bit. You see, Im the kind of person who is purpose driven and it seemed to me there were no purpose in the scrolling. It was just scrolling for scrolling sake and that dopamine hit when doing it. I recoiled in horror. This wasnt social media. This was a digital Skinner box which a lot of anger and hate woven into it. For those of you who dont know what a Skinner box is let me explain. Its basically a box with a lever inside and a dispenser. You put a rat in the box and teach it how to push the lever to get food. Simple as it sounds it reveals a psychological effect of reenforcement. The rat will push the lever long after it stops feeling hunger just to get more food and if you remove the food alltogether the rat will for some time still put push the lever in anticipation of rewards. So, its basically a mechanical reward box and the more I got into Tiktok the more I would relate to the rat in the box. I was like the rat just pushing a button to get a reward and even if nothing happened for sometime on the screen I kept scrolling just like the rat in the box. I recoiled in horror, Tiktok had basically made a lab rat out of me and I was obediently pushing the button to get that warm fuzzy reward feeling and it started to feel oh so wrong so I did what was best for me and quit Tiktok, deleted the account and uninstalled the app. Oh did I have cold turkey afterwards. I craved the scrolling, I craved the videos and I craved becoming angry over the smallest thing. Horrible, absolutely horrible. I felt like a junkie in withdrawals in movies but I stuck to my guns and soon I started feeling better and in the end I was Tiktok free. What a relief. This ordeal made me think. what is social media really about? Is it about us humans creating a town square where we can all have a voice and is it all about making connections so the world truly becomes a global village? Maybe that was the original intention and platforms like IRC and early social media websites did just that but things have changed and it seems to have started with Facebook realizing the idea that screen time and ad revenue was a golden goose which could make them millions. Others followed suit and Tiktok is just the latest in this dependency creating and emotionally manipulating machinery which is created only to make the few and selected ultra rich. Its human misery packaged in an app and due to our nature we seem to crave this misery above all and center our lives around it making us into the most negative aspects of ourselves. Just look at how politicians use social media to pander to the lowest emotional states of their followers, how Facebook earns money on flirting with socially unacceptable behavior, how Twitter (I refuse to call it X) is basically a platform for all the lowest in humanity and how Tiktok silently sensors normal human discourse. They are all in it, that is for sure and they are in it for the money and the power of peoples eye balls and the fact that a decent portion of the population of this planet will take social media as the ultimate source of truth. Social media in general is just a global machine for controlling people. The business people know it, the influencers of the world know it, the politicians know it and in the end its always the same. Make people angry, scared and shocked. The good old shock tactics. The shock rockers of the old would blush. As for me, I decided to stay away from social media and keep my brain to myself. Maybe Im missing out and maybe Im not in touch with the daily media reality but you know what, its ok. I dont need social media to validate myself or my world views and I absolutely dont need to be a slave to a machine which is only going to make me feel empty inside, fearful, angry and hateful to other human beeings. I choose to choose my own venue. After all, I have the whole internet at my disposal and there are still interesting things to be found out there. Maybe one day another form of social media will appear. Something that doesnt stoop to our lowest and most negative emotions. Im pretty certain of it will happen and its going to be great. And oh, yes, Ive found my corner in the form of Discord which is basically IRC with graphics. I hang out there chatting away and listening to others people stories, just like I did back in the nineties. It seems history has gone a full circle. I kinda like it.