A MATTER OF OPINION

Everyone has one. Opinions, that is. We all want to voice our viewpoints and we all want to be heard. Since the internet came along, everyone suddenly had a place to post their thoughts and try to find a place to post it. I use to love the old Chat Rooms. I spent way too much time on an Atheist chat room under the log in name of, Noah’s Cabin Boy. I had a lot of great friends there and we had a lot of fun bantering around our thoughts. We made up this little game called the Penis Game. This involved taking the name of a movie or song title and changing a word and inserting the word “penis”. An example of that was, Honey I Shrunk the Penis. I recall laughing out load at some of the things that people would come up with. I recall that when ever I logged in to that chat room I received a very warm welcome. I certainly do miss that place. Today we have Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, being the most popular, as far as I know. These places are not even close to the camaraderie that was shared on chat rooms. Chat rooms didn’t have advertising interruptions and someone just trying to make an impression by posting some weird meme that they copied from somewhere else. I am an artist and I have the advantage of creating my own memes whenever I like. I recently found a great free website that I use to make Gif files so that I can make my memes move. This isn’t one of those meme makers that people use to post 2 versions of a picture, so that it just flips back and forth. This website allows me to post as many versions of artwork as I want to. I can make 5-6 movements of a character and really have fun with it. But, enough of that, what I want to say is that todays social media seems to be filled with a lot of mean comments. There are a lot of pissed off people that are desperate to post their vitriol to the world. Sure, everyone has a “bone to pick” and we all want our voices heard, but most of the posts are only seen for a few minutes and then they are archived in the list. No one wants to go through a long list of back comments. Then there are groups and we can follow groups of commenters, and at least it puts us into places of similar ideas. Facebook was originally designed by some college boys to post their sophomoric ratings of their fellow college girls, by how hot they were. Who knew that one of those dudes would turn it into a multi- billion dollar empire. This just shows how anxious that people were to find a place to express their opinions. We use Facebook to share pictures and chat with our family members and that is great. Today, people seemed to have stopped calling each other and we text a message, instead. I don’t ever use my phone. I rarely communicate with my siblings and my parents are now dead. It seems that when the parents have died that the adult children reduce the amount of connections that they once shared. It is hard to guess where all of this technology will lead. What I do know is, do NOT accept what you read on the internet as some form of “truth” or fact. Do the research and check around and read all that you can on the matter. People love to criticize the major news media as “fake” news but then I ask, “what is real news” and how would you recognize it.

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