Good and bad

The writing of Bonnie Stewart that I featured yesterday has been hanging around in the back of my mind.

It was the concept of participatory as it related to when I got involved with this. As I write this on Friday morning, I am working on finishing my morning activity of going through a couple of the social networks that I’m involved with. I do this with a purpose in mind – to learn and be better at whatever intrigues me.

I call it free range learning; there are times when I look for something specific and then there are other times where I just am beside myself that I learned something that might someday might come in handy! I’ve pulled two from my reading. The second one inspired me to write.

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The Good

This was a “hack” from Sarah Lalonde. This one might come in handy and save me some money in the process. Apparently, in her world, whiteboard markers have an estimated life expectancy of one school year – unless you find some way to extend it.

Trying out a hack I seen to restore your expo markers! 🤞🏼 https://t.co/KLEdi9O3SK— Sarah Anne Lalonde (@sarahlalondee) May 29, 2019

Sarah makes no claim that she’s the inventor of this technique. It was just something that she saw somewhere else and wanted to try.

Given the success that she had, she wanted to share it with others who might be able to use it.

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The Bad

I’m not even going to dignify this incident by including a link to it here. It happened at a secondary school near here where there happened to be a fight between a couple of students. By itself, that’s not news. In fact, I can recall being a combatant myself at one point. It had a good ending as we ended up becoming the best of friends.

So, it wasn’t the fact that there was an altercation. Sadly, the whole thing was caught on a student’s cell phone and then posted to social media. There was a crowd surrounding the two as there typically is in incidents like this but nobody intervened and the group kept cheering them on. To make things worse, once it was posted to social media, the community including the parents involved got into an online extension of the event.

It really got ugly.

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Arguably, I suppose, both events could have be called “participatory”

But that’s not really the point.

In the beginning of using social media, we had only “The Good” among the online circles that I chose to associate myself with. There was the odd joke added for entertainment value but the biggest faux pas might be taking a photo of your supper and then posting it online. This was mainstream.

“The Bad” ended up sneaking its way into my circles and I don’t like it. Not liking it typically means getting out of that circle so that I don’t see more of it. It’s easily done. But, it bothers me that I have to do this in the first place.

Have we, as a society, become so hungry for attention that we search for the shock factor to get it?

What turned out to be a morning where I was going to enjoy reading stories about the Raptors turned bad in a hurry.

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