Gram This

I am pretty tech savvy, having made my living, such as it is, in IT for the last 20 years or so. I had a front row seat to the commercial explosion of the Internet, working as a software developer in the early 90s. The Web was cool and I wanted to a part of it – even going so far as founding a dot-com.

But when it comes to technology, I am not always, as it turns out, an early adopter. You see, I am pretty cheap, and buying first versions of consumer electronics is not a good way to optimize the household cash flows. Nor is buying the latest hot product when you're old one works just fine. Following the same logic, I would rather put hot pins in my eyes than buy an Apple product – just the fact they are super trendy and garner the highest profit margins of any legal product devised by man is enough to put me off for good. Yeah, I am a bit of a curmudgeon too.

In addition to being pretty savvy, and pretty cheap, I'm also pretty old, so can be pretty late to the party with whatever is the latest uber hip thing. I resisted Facebook for a long time (and sometimes still rue the day I caved), but now have admit it is great for keeping up with friends and family scattered around the globe. And, OK, it does offer a new and interesting perspective of a news feed.

However, for the longest time I just didn't "get" Twitter. In fact, I still don't get Twitter. What's with the 120 characters thing? Need more than 120 characters? Easy, type it into a Word document, take a picture, and tweet the image of your essay. Twitter is stuffed with such photos. Stupid. Or do eight 118 character tweets in quick succession, which are really just one long tweet. Also stupid.

Much to my annoyance, more and more bloggers in the business/investment world have started do their thing on Twitter. So now I have a Twitter account. But really, it is because this specific community happened to congregate there, and Twitter is just a really awkward way to apply a filter to my news and social feeds -  it has nothing to do with Twitter's technology,  and in fact the technology gets in the way more than it helps, hence all the tweets of pictures of text.

OK, so I've got a Twitter feed for finance, and Crackbook stream for friends and cat videos. But it never ends. I hear Instagram is trending well, and everybody who is anybody is on Snapchat. I definitely do not get Instagram, and don't even get me started on Snapchat. How is Instagram really any different/better than Flickr/Facebook/Twitter? I do not have an Instagram account, but I'm sure the answer is "it's not". Except all the really cool people are there. And apparently dedicating frightening amounts of time and money in the pursuit of the perfect selfie that will "trend" well and get them all sorts of new Instafriends. Can human culture get any sadder?

Shutterstock/Aleksandar Stojkovic

Keeping up with this madness means staggering from one site to another, each with their own special shtick tailored to self-obsessed narcissists (is there any other sort of narcissist?). What goes without saying, but I'll say anyway, is that by the time most of the wannabe hipsters have Gram accounts, all the cool people will have moved on to Vacupost, Narcissite, or Selfies-r-us, which are all seeing their traffic volumes explode. No doubt they'll all be unicorns by next year.

In life, there comes a time when you have to accept that things must change for you, and you can't go back. In my twenties, I avowed to never drink to excess again. In my thirties it was never work to in an office again. In my forties ... well mostly I just skied a lot and didn't bother with life-changing resolutions. So it is high time to put my foot down.

I just say "no" to Instagram and the long line of putrid, vapid, narcissistic, and pointless web-based social pits that are sure to follow.

Gram that!