I have long had a love-hate relationship with social media. It is a tool, particularly for websites such as this, but it can too easily become a distraction.
It is far too easy to spend hours staring at your facebook or twitter timelines and not realise where the time has gone. Sometimes you’ll see something that’ll warm your heart, but that is pretty rare in the scheme of things –good news doesn’t trend the way anger and bitterness so often do.
I would like to find another way to communicate with those of you who read these articles, whether that means creating a mailing list, or holding actual physical meetups. The eventual aim will be to delete the facebook and twitter accounts, both business and personal. The Instagram accounts have already gone.
A breather…
To test the waters, I’m going to take a year off from the social media channels. Lately they have started to feel like having front-row seats to the apocalypse. Even when you try to curate your feed to keep things even remotely positive, the detritus has a way of rising to the top and you end up with a very skewed perspective on the world.
Starting today, we’re deleting the apps, logging out and going quiet. New posts here will continue to be posted to the social media feeds –that happens automatically, new videos will continue to appear on the YouTube channel, but we won’t be engaging in conversations, or getting enraged by the stream of dismal, scorched-earth political shenanigans that has become a constant feature these past few years.
The alternatives…
At the bottom of this page should be a subscribe button. If you enter your email address and press “subscribe” each new article will be delivered to your inbox. If you are already a wordpress user you can also follow us through that and we’ll appear in your reader view.
I’m still exploring the options at the moment. There’s certainly a place for real-time chat and group discussions, so perhaps a Slack or Discord channel may work, but having grown up at the dawn of email, there’s still a soft-spot for it. You’ll find us here.
Cheers, all!
Cardiff By Bike 