35 of 50

I’ve been on Twitter since May 2007, almost from the very beginning. It was a different beast then. You mostly sent your tweets via SMS on your dumb-phone and received them the same way. Nowadays it’s a hot mess of trolls and loudmouths who in the early days mocked the geeks and nerds who were the early adopters. You pick your friends and followers carefully and hope that Elon Musk isn’t forced into buying it.

When I was even younger than I was in 2007, say anywhere between 5 and 18, social media was about hanging out with your friends. There were no mobile phones, most of our playgrounds were outside and when it wasn’t we were in and out of one another’s houses. We played boardgames (still do that), and later D&D™, when we communicated it was either face to face, on a rotary telephone that was connected to the wall via a cable or in extreme cases via dead-drops inspired by the Usborne Spy’s Guidebook

Of course we had our falling outs and disagreements the same as Twitter does now, but it was much more difficult to block the person you saw everyday, so fences were soon mended.

Looking back though, despite all of those modern advances in technology supposed to keep us closer together I reckon I am probably further apart from those people I used to hang out with. I think I’ve lost touch completely with a good proportion of them and many that I am still in contact with, it is rare that I see them face to face (the last couple of years with Covid excepted). I don’t think that’s particularly unusual though. When I think of the number of different individuals I’ve interacted with as “friends” over the years there are only a small handful that I am still in contact with in any form. I wonder whether this is because I am of the pre social media generation where communication was mostly face to face or via a telephone, there was no What’sApp or similar and even the phone was limited to one per household rather than per person. Communication took effort. Does that mean that many people weren’t worth the effort? No I don’t think so I think it is probably more that it was easier to slowly drift apart when a call wasn’t returned or a letter wasn’t replied to. Add to that if you were more introvert than extrovert then it was probably easier still.

I did take some time to see if I could track down some of those people I’ve lost contact with. I tried a couple with more unusual names, thinking that they would be easier to find amongst the many million of users. Without becoming too much of a stalker though it looks like that even they don’t use social media even today. So I guess that means in those cases they are gone forever? I should say at this point that after over 40 years if we had wanted to get in touch we probably could have managed it somehow, so it is probably just not what one or both of us wants. Also from my perspective I find too much time on social media is bad for my mental health, so I don’t do Facebook at all (although I still have an account there), and limit my time on Twitter and Instagram. The other channels that exist I don’t have accounts for. If you’re interested I am mostly @tontowilliams wherever I do interact, but I am increasingly feeling like the dead-drops of my childhood might be the way to go.