Facebook: HOW TO SURVIVE PERVERTS, IDIOTS AND CON (WO) MEN

Social media platform works best when content focuses on ideas and content, such as arts, literature, music, and cultural exchanges Surviving social media requires thick skin: the writer learned to spot and ignore perverts, fakes, and manipulators

- By Gamini Akmeemana

For those who started writing on typewriters, drove rear wheel drive vehicles, or made phone calls on ancient contraptions which insisted that numbers be dialled by turning a ring (crazy!), social media is at best a necessary evil. But it dawns upon even the most recalcitrant that Facebook or Instagram is a one-upmanship (or personship) game, and those who dread being left out in the cold would sooner or later join the ranks of social media hordes just to keep up with their own offspring, if not with the neighbours.

Expect some of the worst more than the best, and you will survive social media. You may even get to like it.

I was a late starter with digital things, going for a mobile phone only when my children began wondering why they couldn’t text me. I bought a digital camera only when the last colour film developing lab in Colombo shut down. This was due to a chronic inability to curb down nostalgia. I stayed determinedly away from Facebook for reasons which aren’t yet clear to me.

I finally started a Facebook page ten years ago, but found it boring, and left soon after. When you do that, Facebook asks you why. I said I didn’t need it so much at that time.

Five years ago, I decided to return, and also to start a YouTube channel. This was before Covid. The crisis faced by print media (books, journals, newspapers) all over the world was already very evident; and something which happens to late starters happened to me regarding digital media — I threw myself into these two platforms with enthusiasm, and saw digital journalism and video vlogs as a good parallel path to travel alongside the well-trodden and somewhat shaky print path.

Ten or so years later, I don’t find it endearing (I haven’t tried Twitter or Intagram because I don’t want to start collecting social media platforms the way I collected books). But it’s useful, and I’m a regular user and contributor.