Phubbing and Twitter

 

Telephone Wire Basket with Computer Components
Dail Behennah (b. 1953)
Photo Credit: Somerset County Council [CC BY-NC-ND] 

Phubbing - the practice of ignoring or snubbing your partner in favour of your smartphone, of scrolling endlessly through Instagram streams of people you don't know, inhaling TikTok content designed for someone a third of your age but LOL AMIRIGHT, studying YouTube masterclasses on the correct way to fold fitted sheets, and in doing so ignoring all gentle enquiries re the quality of your day and what you should have for dinner - is according to Turkish scientists, damaging to relationships...

While it's always nice to have scientists confirm things we instinctively know about our lifestyles with funded research and measured statements such as "marital conflict mainly occurs when people are ignored by those they value", we definitely did already know this about our lifestyles, didn't we?

... attempts to stop phubbing have come and gone. Remember that hilarious middle-class game where everyone had to pile their phones up in the middle of a restaurant table, ignore their blips and tones and mechanical appeals for attention during the course of the meal, and whoever gave in first and picked up had to pay the bill?

(Polly Vernon, The Times, 2023)

Phubbing - a new word entering my vocabulary and what sums up this whole deranged concept is the following article in Private Eye.

Twitter users 'forced to do some work'

Twitter users were dismayed this week after Elon Musk put limits on the number of tweets they could see. This meant many were locked out, being forced instead to do some work and interact with their families, whilst others went outside for the first time in months.

"It's a nightmare, it's 10am on a Monday morning and instead of doom-scrolling through thousands of tweets, I'm locked out and having to do some work instead. Damn you, Elon Musk, damn you to hell," said one Twitter user.

Another described the shock of discovering he has three children, and not two, as he'd thought, whilst others were desperate to share the horrors of going outside with Twitter, but couldn't, as the only reason they were going outside was because they were locked out of Twitter.

Twitter owner, Elon Musk, insisted that limiting the number of tweets a user could see was really because of "severe data scraping" and not because he's a cheapskate who has sacked all his engineers and not paid any of his bills.

(Private Eye, No 1602)