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Karl Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses (Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes), meaning the promise of eternal happiness after a short, hard, miserable life distracted the proleteriat from what should have been their natural occupation of overthrowing the ruling classes.

What John Logie Baird thought about that isn't recorded, but either way, he promptly invented something an order of magnitude more effective at preventing the working classes from revolution - who cares about not owning the means of production & lining the pockets of the bourgeoisie by the sweat of their brow when you can put your feet up when you get home & watch people more miserable than you on rolling news channels or, bog help us, Eastenders, or watch the clueless shagwittery of wannabes aspiring to be Z-list "celebrities" on Big Brother and its ilk.

How much more insidious then is the cult of "social networking", where the youth of today spend every moment (and any chance of achieving anything meaningful) on fingering their preciouses... whoever you are, you're not CNN, we do not need constant updates. Nor do you need the constant stream of mitherings from the twattersphere, not when "friend" is now a synonym for "any Muppet that can click a virtual "button".


So (and I use that in its correct sense, a summarising word, where the full reasoning behind the conclusion is made explicit, not redacted, or not even thought about, is either a display of arrogance, or stupidity, as appropriate (I now have two categories to people that make me stop listening / change TV or radio channel: 1 - people beginning an answer with "so" and 2 - convicted woman beater Geoffrey Boycott ))... you may gather I do not like social networking; in fact I regard it as hypnosis to procrastinate, cubed.

Imagine then the fullness of my loathing for the the Facebook-isation of eBay. And it's not that I even like eBay, to me this is making something bad even worse, unpleasantly like an illness causing purging of the bowels alternating with vomiting.

For some time now, I haven't had access to saved sellers or saved searches, no. Now, in an unpleasant mangling of language, they are "Followed Sellers" or "Searches I follow". I can almost live with the former, but "following searches" causes the contents of my bladder to rapidly reach 100 Celcius. You can follow a person (although usually a cult leader, which is not necessarily to be recommended), and at a stretch, maybe even an institution, as that can be viewed as a collection of individuals.

I do not however, follow a search. It's not a person, it's not an institution, it's not even something created by someone else (or, going off at a tangent, an animal: I distinctly remember being exhorted to follow a bear at some point, although to what end is no longer clear), it has no physical manifestation (save microscopic magnetic changes to the ferrous metal of a tiny portion of a hard drive buried in a data centre somewhere, it's a purely notional wisp allowing me to part with my money slightly quicker.


To sum up then: "followed" searches: horse hooey.

Following a search sounds like it would be a very indefinite thing to do anyway.

Panem et circenses by the way, JR...

Edou wrote:

Panem et circenses by the way, JR...

Ah yes, bread and chariot races, predating Marx by some time ... this is what happens when you go straight into a rant without doing all the research first

Very impressive rant JR!
SO, -Have you tried putting it in the other way around? It might bind less...

As chokingly mad as it is, society WANTS to be this way, & if you don't follow the masses they'll be quick to point out that there must be something wrong with YOU. After all, "Normal" is just what the majority are doing, & if you don't fall into that category, it's you that is the blemish, however stupid what the masses are doing is

Have you considered that this forum is a form of social media, JR?

Have you watched the film Edou?

Hear what you're saying Martin, I don't get out much either - it's far easier to babble on here than actually meet up & talk to someone in person, but you can't really compare it to facebook can you?...

Update: just finished a cuppa, shower next LOL etc
Update: just put my slippers on, check out my selfy
Update: TOWIE's on! I've died & gone to heaven!

Die, heathens, you are all of what's wrong with my telly & I choke when I realise I share my air with you.....

eddrick wrote:

Have you watched the film Edou?

Don't quite recall but I've now started on it (there's a high def version on YouTube).
You could call that a social media update...
Other stuff - cleaned the gutters (it was leaking) and gave my bike some much needed maintenance.
No selfies from me, they were only somewhat amusing before the digital era. And with someone else's camera of course.



Oh yeah, ate some home grown strawberries.

I know what you mean Eddrick. I do use Facebook but, I hope, in moderation. It's useful for finding and keeping up with old school friends for example.

If people start to annoy me, I just block their posts. It means I do not have to commit the unforgivable Internet snub of "de-friending" them, but I don't have to read their drivel. I have one friend from school who now has four children and constantly drones on about how wonderful they are and how well they are doing at their miriad of activities and how tired she is running around after them all the time. This is the same friend who proudly recounted the midwife's comment at the birth of her third child about how soft her cervix was. She's blocked. Sadly I can't block the "round-robin" letters (normally 3 sheets of A4 paper) we get at Christmas.