Digital coma

OK, one last post about social media and the effect that it has on us (or, more accurately, some of us)...

I was recently pleased to see that a user of Twitter had called to task two separate tweets that described Dusky Warblers as 'stunning'. They are not. They make Dunnocks look positively exotic. A rainbow is stunning. The Northern Lights are stunning. The Milky Way is stunning. Dusky Warblers are not. It got me thinking as to why the composers of said 'Dusky Warbler' tweets felt compelled to use the word 'stunning'. I blame peer pressure and, of course, social media.

Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat (keep up Grandad) are all based on the notion that short, sharp messages/images can be sent out into the world so that others can read/see what you are doing. For a certain demographic this means looking good, being seen to be having fun and, most crucially 'having a better time than you'. So when you see an image of a meal, a group shot of friends out for a drink, or the view from a hotel balcony, they have to be aspirational - the food needs to look delicious, the people have to be all smiling, and the weather conditions on the balcony hot and sunny. And as for the selfies, well, posing has become an art form, with the need for the ability to catch the right angle, know what is your best side and maybe - just maybe - how to use a photo filter to get the best out of your image.

What has that got to do with middle-aged birders? Well, quite a lot actually. As much as most stick to Twitter and Facebook, the same rules that the youth follow seem to apply. A Dusky Warbler is not enough just by being rare. It has to be stunning. Stunning suggests an event. It suggests an emotional happening. It suggests that 'you really should have been here'. People don't do 'ordinary' or even 'interesting'. They want to be seen to be doing 'stunning'.

And it's not just the kids that overdose on selfies. There are several birders out there that are forever plastering pictures of their faces all over the place for us all to see. Posing on a headland. Gurning at a Birdfair. Reclining in a hide. In a car on the way to a twitch. Having dipped. Having 'scored'. I have alluded to the 'group shot' of birding 'crews' already, lined up aspiring to be ornithological gunslingers or pretending to be following in the footsteps of Shackleton or Scott, rather than just about to go birding. Narcissistic? Just being sociable? Does it really matter? No, not really, but it's fair to comment on such a social phenomena. Maybe I'm just jealous that I'm not with them, having fun, being a trailblazer, part of a scene. And deep down that's exactly what their purpose is, to make you feel envious. Maybe I'm reading too much into it.

The last aspect I'll touch on is the need for some birders to let us all know that they have 'found' a bird, as in 'I have just found a Hoopoe Lark at Dungeness'. I know plenty of birders who regularly find good birds and who never feel the need to do anything other than report the presence of said rarity, such as 'Hoopoe Lark at Dungeness, present on grass by Old Lighthouse'. Do we need to know that you have found it? Isn't this just another symptom of social media that reduces us to become mini marketing machines, pumping out information to promote ourselves?

Did I say that was my last point? Sorry, thought of something else. Social media, buy dint of the need for brevity, is slowly turning us all into lazy practitioners in the use of our language. Hence the overuse of words like 'awesome', 'stunning' and 'cracking'. They have become a lazy shorthand. Thought is going out of the window.

And before anybody accuses me of being on a high horse, I can be just as guilty as others. This subject fascinates me as much as it infuriates me. We are (mostly) sleepwalking into a digital coma. We need to be aware before it's too late.