And Now, Instagram

Facebook isn't just in trouble after former Facebook employee Frances Haugen (below) blew the whistle on its encouragement of hate speech to make money.  Instagram is now under scrutiny for promoting itself to teenage girls and damaging their sense of self-worth.

It seems that teenage girls spend a lot of time on Instagram looking at pictures of perfectly beautiful women in their early twenties - the very sort of women that teenage girls always try to emulate - and develop inferiority complexes when they realize that they can't have perfect bodies or faces like the young women they want to be like.   Many of them starve themselves for that perfect body, and some of them engage in even more destructive behavior.   Instagram has created a whole generation of teenagers - not just girls, but, I'm sure, but boys also (imagine Big Man On Campus types Instagram on making geeks feel inferior because they have the cool cars, the cool clothes, and, ironically, the hot girls) - who feel like they're the most cursed generation that has ever lived.  And for reasons having nothing to do with a dying planet.

Oh yeah, I have an account on Instagram.  I mostly use it to look at pictures of cars from automakers and pictures of scenery from friends who travel.  But without a smartphone, I can't post pictures of my own.  (People follow my account anyway.  Go figure.)  I've tried to find a way to post on it with my laptop, but to no avail.  More and more, though, I feel like I'm better off not bothering.  Many of the pictures I see are pictures those same friends have posted on Facebook.  All it's really good for is to follow and communicate with friends who depend more time there than on Facebook or Twitter.   I spend enough time posting pictures on Facebook; why bother to do the same thing on one of Facebook's sister sites?  (I never visit WhatsApp.)

And it's not only  teenagers who get depressed by Instagram.  Listen to this confession from CNN's Anderson Cooper:

"I'm on Instagram and I enjoy it.  I follow friends and look at art sites and things like that. But I gotta say, it depresses me. I mean, I leave feeling worse than when I got on.

"I feel worse about my own life, I cannot imagine what a teenager feels.  I mean, I'm supposedly an adult. What some kid feels looking at other people's lives and how their lives seem much more exciting than their own."

And when I think about it, I get a little depressed too when I go on Instagram and see other people in exotic locales such as France and Holland.  And I'm stuck in New Jersey.  If my friends who use Instagram exclusively - both of them - were on Facebook, I wouldn't go on Instagram so much.

Oh yeah, don't expect Congress, after the Senate heard Haugen testify on Facebook and its sister sites, to go after Mark Zuckerberg like a rabid pit bull.  The Z-man has plenty of lobbyists to tame them.

I'm Dreaming of a White COVID - The Sequel

 Swell.

We have another major snowstorm bearing down on the American Northeast, where I live, at the same time we're being warned that the COVID crisis could last right into 2022 and get even worse before it gets worse still.  As for the snow . . . up to two feet, gusty winds, blackout threat  - all of the stuff we had to go through in the storm we had back in December 2020.  Except that, unlike that storm, this one could live up to the hype.

I'll back - I don't know when, obviously - to talk more about the COVID crisis, but after hearing everything Michael Osterholm and Laurie Garrett have said about what to expect, between COVID and the heavy snow, I prefer the heavy snow.  At least I know the snow is going to melt away.

And I'm convinced that if Osterholm and Garrett were husband and wife, they'd probably celebrate their wedding anniversary with cups of hemlock.

I'm Dreaming of a White COVID

Allow me to get personal here.

Recent events in the outside world and my personal life have caused me to sink into a deep depression.  I have had to battle with anent-mindedness and inattentiveness all my life, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which has robbed, like everyone else of a normal life and has caused me - again, like everyone else - to spend most of my time at home have taken a toll on my psychological well-being.  And now, having already endured the worst year of my life, it's going to get even worse with tomorrow's weather - a snowstorm that threatens to become a full-blown blizzard.   

I don't have to clear the snow - we have someone who does that for us - but the idea of having a winter storm forecasters have been calling "major," "powerful" and "significant" - again, adjectives you never want to see in any weather forecast - this early in the season at a time when we're in the worst of the worst pandemic in a century depresses me even more.  (I may even have to worry about the possibility of an electrical outage!)  Somehow, despite the COVID vaccines, the sentence "We will get through this" has come to sound empty and meaningless.  And to think this year started with a benign winter and nothing but better times that I - and I'm sure, you as well - was looking forward to.

The good news is that 2020 will end. The bad news is that 2021 isn't really going to be all that much better.  I'll have more to say about this outgoing year when it's all but over. 😞 😧