Mike's Social Networks, like twitter are a waste of time

From what I have experienced, social networking is a complete waste of time for the average person. This is regardless of whether or not it is a personal or business form.

I can see that for a celebrity or person known to the public there are many people around who hang on to every word these celebrities utter, but really, it’s mostly nonsense and self-promoting.

That’s not to say that there are no good outcomes. Twitter was used famously in the Middle East when the uprisings or Arab Spring came about. It was a lifeline to tell the world about the things that were happening. But this is not the same as the average Joe who says something on twitter and expects a response. Unless it’s outrageous or racist then there are plenty of twits who will happily express their outrage that someone dares to say what they are thinking.

Most people use twitter to promote their company, product or services not to express their genuine feelings about something important – they do that when linking to a famous person’s site but for those of us who are not famous, it’s water off a duck’s back. It’s all about promotion of self.

This is not a complaint, just happens to be the way I see things. On a previous twitter account I held, it had a few hundred followers but all I got was self-promotion, not once did I ever see anything remotely like an original thought or suggestion of a conversation. I put up a tweet asking if anybody ever read anything I had posted but never got a response, just more of the same previous, tiresome nonsense.

So why do we have a twitter account for this site? It’s expected. Have a look at it and see if you can find anything that has anything to do with the site or its content, unless it has come from the site itself. We get lots of people entering sayings they have read from a book or some other hokum, such as “For true happiness love everyone more and yourself less.” Wow, I’m impressed, even if I just made it up. I would expect you to follow me forever to read more of this wisdom.

I gave up using facebook a couple of years ago; still have the account I just don’t go to it. LinkedIn is much the same, more people offering their services. I joined a group as I thought this would be for like-minded people to express themselves and talk through issues. Some hope! It was more of the same, nice folks offering their advice – for a price.

You could say this is nothing more than the ramblings of an old man who is not hip with modern thinking and communications. That may be true in some respects as I’m not a master of texting, however, through my dealings with business people I can say with some authority that to most the web and its offshoots are a mystery. Not that they would admit to this, or even believe it to be true!

I won’t bore you to tears with examples as I am just expressing a personal viewpoint and I may have written about it on this site’s blog.

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