The Sun Herald columnist Jacqueline Marley recently suggested that all the swiping up and down on social media, had the potential to drain a writer's creativity.
Fairfax Media published her article on Christmas Eve, which was a Sunday. If such an article, which advocated for readers to drop the social media habit, whenever possible, was published on any other day, Fairfax stakeholders and shareholders, who rely on the company's strong social media presence, might have objected. As it turns out, you can get away with more if you publish on Christmas Eve. It is possible that an article telling you to go social media cold turkey, might go down reasonably well, while you eat your Christmas turkey.
All jokes aside, however, I do agree with Ms Marley's observations.
She described how it was for her, when her "... rational brain... shout[ed] stop scrolling! Put the phone down, but [her] compulsive... brain... was in charge of [her]..."
Ms Marley stressed the need to "daydream" to be "creative," but she thought this was not possible if she crammed endless social information from everyone else's tweets, into her psyche.
She stated that just because social media users did not have anything to say, did not stop them from creating vast masses of content. She more or less considered this to be a rule of thumb for social media content creators. This did not mean she agreed with that rule.
Ms Marley, in the worst-case-scenario, hinted that much of what existed on Twitter had the potential to make people have a kind of contempt for humanity, if Twitter and, for that matter, other forms of social media were not kept in place.
What interests me about the idea that we go cold turkey from all of this internet nonsense, is that it aligns with what I have suggested for a long time. That is that we all need to get away from all these absurd national and the international tweets from private individuals. Instead, we should focus be on what's happening in our own locality. If we can get things right at home first, then we have a good chance of fixing the world. If, however, we do this in reverse, then we won't fix anything — Joseph Walz
The article quoted was: 'Since the chief twit took over, it's socially acceptable to quit.' That article was in the Sun Herald on Sunday December 24, 2023. That piece was written by Jacqueline Marley.