NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

I was quite a late adopter of Facebook. I only created an account when the Pan-species Listing Group created a page and started to put a lot of useful information on it. And then I realised that an awful lot of natural history themed societies and interest groups had done the same, so I joined them. And when you do that, individuals get to see that you are floating around cyberspace, so they send you a Facebook friend request. And likewise, I've seen people floating around as well, and sent them friend requests. And after a while, voila, my Facebook thread is constantly filled with all sorts of stuff. Most of it interesting, some of it useful, but my God I do appear to have friended a load of narcissists! There are people out there who cannot help themselves but update their profile picture every few days, or post about how many push-ups they can do, what brilliant birders they are or how marvellous their car/camera/holiday/house is. And don't get me started on those that feel ...

A number of my linked bloggers have been discussing the merits (or otherwise) of social media, plus whether or not ‘cyber’ friends can be considered ‘real' friends. Never one to miss an opportunity to sound off, or use the ideas of others, I will join in with the fun. Facebook Apparently now the domain of the middle-aged, as the youngsters of today have largely given up on it in favour of using Instagram and Snap Chat (and before you think I’m really well up on all of this, I’m not. I read it somewhere). My adoption on Facebook was very late indeed. I tend not to use my personal timeline much, and if you were to visit my ‘home page’ you would be hard pushed for find out anything about me at all. 99% of my activity on this platform is as a member of various natural history groups - I must be a member of 40+, all sorts of generalist and specialist subjects. These are useful for keeping up to date with what is being seen, identification tips, taxonomic changes, member’s opinions...

Before you assume that this post will be full of negativity towards 'social media', it isn't - at least not all of it. I've had a bit of a whirlwind 24 hours with Facebook. I'm not a complete luddite when it comes to this particular brand. Like a lot of these social media options, I was an early adopter purely because I worked in media and we were encouraged to 'dip our toes in the water'. So Facebook and Twitter were duly embraced and quietly put down again soon afterwards. I've stopped and started with Facebook several times. I've normally stopped due to social embarrassment - for example, be-friending a family friends 13-year old daughter seemed to be the correct thing to do, as she had requested to 'become my friend'. But when I was subsequently bombarded by information and 'do you know' alerts which all were emanating from up to 20-30 young teenage girls, I could sense the Operation Yew Tree police starting to rev up their en...