I opened up my WordPress blog to discover that, having opened it over a half-dozen years ago, I’ve written but a handful of posts on it; the rest of my ire, wrath and anger have all been sent to that pantheon of social media, one of the two major sources of news, Facebook.

For at least a year now, maybe two or three, I have become disillusioned with Facebook for a number of reasons.  My tendency to rant has not diminished over the years; however, Facebook’s tendency to squash these rants to as few a number of readers as possible has increased.

There are a lot of bloggers who have blogged their entire lives for perhaps over 15 years now, and – as usual – I am one of the last to jump on the bandwagon.  Why is that, I hear you cry?  Well, it’s because, in part, I am simply too busy doing other stuff – including ranting on Facebook, to keep it up.  When I have finished writing a rant, I am physically – as well as mentally – drained to almost the maximum, and I frequently lie back in my chair and sleep.  This is the result of my sodding condition, Fibromyalgia.  It hurts and drains me to write at the same time.  I take pills for the pain, but I cannot do anything about the urge to sleep throughout the day – the pills are most likely a part of the cause, anyway.

Every so often I make a pledge with myself that I will begin using the blog regularly, but never seemed to want to give up the various things that take my time up during the day.

This time is different.

I don’t know whether it is because of some sort of revelation or not – I certainly don’t recall one.  I felt that it was time to put Facebook behind me – at least, the ranting side of it.

I have to keep up with my friends and family, there’s no question of that.  Social media was set up, I believe, in the wake of Friends Reunited, for folk to reconnect, and in many cases connect for the first time, once it became clear that the more friends you have, the more whatever it is you’re trying to make money from will reach more people.  And I got sucked into that; I had many, many dozens of friend requests every single day from almost every country in the world, and I took them all until I ran out of space.  I was happy to do that, and I was equally happy to have a listen to their music and try out the album they were selling.

But, you know, all of that stuff became insidious.  You could write messages by the thousand, with each tailored to their recipient, even including the recipient’s name.  There was something slightly weird about that, I felt.

So I tried it.  Selling my own music through social media.  I did it on a number of occasions with albums I made either alone or with my dear brother, composer Julian Butler.  If you hover over his name, dear reader, you should be able to click a link to his very excellent website, and go and enjoy his own particular brand of writing both lyrically and musically.  I was direct about my music.  I said it was fantastic but there were limitations.  Please buy it, I said.  And in – what?  Five years? – I’ve had not one shred of evidence that it has generated the sale of even so much as one single copy outside of those very kindly bought by friends and family.

And these loyal, supportive and generous friends and family are the reason why I intend to keep my Facebook account – and certainly my Twitter account (you’ve got to go after Donald Trump somehow) – open.  Until Facebook introduces another measure to reduce its membership.

The dream is over, boys and girls.  The internet bubble has now burst and is nothing but a stream of filthy water rushing slightly downhill to the sewer.  And once it goes down that drain it will merge forever with the murky waters of the Dark Web.  Who would have thought it, that there could actually be a post-internet world?  An age when the world wide web would, and could, be superceded by some other technology from which Corporate America would be prevented from hijacking.

I hope that day comes.