Social Media makes me feel old

Our Art club uses Instagram to promote its weekly drawing programs, and since the people we want to reach are generally active on that very-visual-platform, we are forced to use it. On Sunday, when we were all posing for the customary after session group photo, I made a comment about how Instagram is the bane of our lives. Pat came a quip from a youngster beside me. “Then you should run around Bangalore sticking posters.”

OK, maybe I deserved that.

In the early 90s, older folk would complain about how difficult it was to use their VCRs. In the early 2000s, before the cloud became a thing, I used FTP to upload files to our server. It tickled my younger self to see grey haired executives at organisations misuse the term FTP to mean all kinds of ‘internet stuff’.

Now it’s happening to me. I recently visited Facebook after a hiatus of eight years, and oh gods, it looks like the controls in an aeroplane cockpit. I find Instagram really confusing too, and I’m not the only one. The founder of a finance startup called Zerodha made the news a few days ago, when some of his staff had to walk him through the Instagram interface, explaining its features.

Logging into Facebook and being confronted with the Meta interface. IMGSRC: Gawker

This has been a secret fear of mine for a while. Will growing older make me incompetent with technology? I don’t know. Emacs turned out to be easy once I started using it, and a lot of people say Emacs is hard to learn because of its uncommon key bindings, TUI interface and so on, and the people who find it hard are programmers. I could never wrap my head around programming, but I picked up Emacs, didn’t I?

Is it a matter of interest, then? If I find a piece of technology interesting enough, it doesn’t seem hard to pick up, and I’ve never really found post BB forum-social media interesting.

So, that’s what I’m going to tell myself. That I’m not turning into a Luddite in my fifties, just uninterested in some things.