Brief thoughts on ‘trust’ and a few on social media, too.

i) Social Media thoughts ii) on Trust.

I have not stopped updating this blog, although only producing one post for the whole of 2014 may seem like I have ceased blogging. I think deactivating my Twitter account in 2013 resulted in loosing some good contacts and writer friends, as well as my occasional forays into #writechat, #scifichat and various other writer related forums on Twitter. Being active on those forums made me want to blog – it gave me an incentive, much the same way as my Creative Writing class I was attending did. It was getting to stage however that I became more focused on using Twitter to say some questionable things whilst I had drunk too much alcohol in the evenings, such as the things that had gone wrong with my marriage and becoming homeless; I suppose any person who had lived so long with a partner, marriage, raising children and then having a sense of being rejected from all the good you did would feel the same. I mentioned this before here, so in a hasty decision I deactivated the account and hence lost all those good followers I had. I think shifting over to Facebook was probably a very unwise move – it is just not the same as Twitter for the reasons I had set up the account in the first place. I mean this in terms of using it in finding fledgling writers, all with the same agenda of getting our written work published; finding publishers; self publishing; using modern e-readers and the formatting issues et al were my main focus in using Twitter, i.e finding ‘contacts’. Facebook is a much more individual, personal experience without the link to ‘the many’ that I found on Twitter in the forums mentioned above. Old school friends, family, work friends etc are Facebook’s main focus, and sometimes I think that it is not such a good or healthy method of social networking – an electronic method of communication? Maybe if I had succeeded in achieving something great in my life, then perhaps less the critical stance on that particular social networking site I personally have. I suppose I would have no qualms about stating what a wonderful job and family I had, how good my life is and so on. With all the media focus on what people tweet or what they publish on Facebook et al, then I am wondering if social networking holds much that is positive – abusive trolling, quite vicious political arguments, sexism, racism and so on; I guess possibly though it is just a mirror to what actually people are reading, watching and thinking about in today’s world, but is this form of media and actual zeitgeist and catalyst influencing modern, 21st Century culture? For someone like myself who became an early adopter of the whole internet and IT ‘thing’, I sometimes wonder as if I have been left standing with the rapid progress and the more ‘social’ aspect that what it has become today, what it turned into has overtaken me and has thrown me from the road I was following, almost killing me. When I started using the internet back in the mid 1990s, then it was a much more tech focused thing, using analogue modems (anyone remember modem init strings?), needing to have a degree of technical capability to really understand how it worked and fix issues (hence I ended up very briefly working for an Internet firm and went on to study Computing at University level – another story for another time) – it was actually I believe much more ‘fun’ back then than it is today, being right on the cusp of progress? Am I being elitist here, or am I just such a geeky, introverted bloke that I preferred the tech challenge? Windows today is all ‘under the bonnet’, compared to how things were with DOS, Windows 3.1, Win95 and to a lesser extent XP (the beginning of the ‘end’). I digress (reminisce) here.

Trust is a very vital component of our emotional lives. Trust is whereby you can speak and relate to someone you consider close to you. Maybe that closeness involves a loving relationship, perhaps it is your partner, your wife or husband; someone emotionally tied up with your life, someone you consider a friend, a soul mate, someone who has experienced the same things you have been through in life. Someone on the same ‘wavelength’. Also, the concept of trust is also related to your family relationships – in a time of need who do you go to first? Perhaps if you end up unemployed and on the streets, away from the security you normally were used to, then asking a family member for guidance or help would just be second nature; perhaps they could offer you a place to stay in your time of need? I think, as a species, without that support network in place in society, without that feeling that you can love or trust someone (either a spouse or a family member), then we become depressed and disorientated; we loose what it is to be human, forgetting what it is to be kind, loving and compassionate when rejection is offered to you instead. It is worth pondering this for a moment – just how selfish, abusive and deceitful we can become in on a personal level, especially when there is financial and material gain from being so emotionally ugly. Almost soulless.

Thats it, ’tis all I have to say at this moment – more as a way of actually trying to keep wordpress active than anything else. I still need to write the experience of adoption and what it involved tracing my natural Mother all those years ago. It has proven to be very challenging to express the feelings on a literal level, feelings that overtook me over fifteen years ago.