A study cited in the morning\u2019s lying press showed statistics that kids were less likely to do drugs these days. The thesis these researchers had come up with was they were doping themselves on social media, a steady drip of dopamine pleasure, nearly constant in their waking, if somnambulistic, hours. Social media as narcotic\u2026.<\/p>\n
You live down at the tail end of an island far from the tentacles of Facebook, you forget sometimes you\u2019ve set yourself adrift from the continental shores of 21st century modernity, but as the riptides sweep you away and the land lines tear loose from the walls, those messages from the Mainland become fader and more indistinct, Morse code from telegraph poles rotting in the relentless rains.<\/p>\n
For a confirmed xenophobe, this desire to stay in constant contact with strangers and family and friends is bemusing, like stuffing messages in bottles all day long and setting them loose on the tides. I had a buddy back in high school who was a ham radio operator tapping out code to other hamsters overseas and across the globe, who stayed up late in his room on the chance that meteorological conditions were ripe for some far away contact. \u201cI talked to a guy in England,\u201d he would tell me the following morning. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhadja talk about?\u201d I\u2019d ask. Invariably, nothing much, just name, serial numbers and rank. Where they lived. Age, maybe. I guess we just have this desire to make contact, to let someone know we\u2019re out there, that we\u2019re not alone. Same reason we send radio signals into space. Same reason we write blogs. Ironically, my buddy the ham radio operator slowly became afraid of human interaction of all kinds, what the shrinks call agoraphobic. I tried getting in touch with him some years after the last time I saw him, but he\u2019d lost his job, moved away from his house in Missoula and now even Google can\u2019t locate him. I imagine him holed up in some desolate place, tapping Morse code late into the comforting night, listening for an answer from folks he\u2019ll never have to meet, all his bottles crashing onto lonesome beaches in places he\u2019ll never see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A study cited in the morning\u2019s lying press showed statistics that kids were less likely to do drugs these days. The thesis these researchers had come up with was they were doping themselves on social media, a steady drip of dopamine pleasure, nearly constant in their waking, if somnambulistic, hours. Social media as narcotic\u2026. You […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[7197,8014,8013],"class_list":["post-20810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-facebook-agoraphobia","tag-ham-radio-facebook","tag-message-in-a-bottle"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20810"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20819,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20810\/revisions\/20819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}