Peter Bromhead: Anti-social media

Illustration / Peter Bromhead

I'm not a great fan of social media, so when a new application called Disqus Digests invaded my mailbox, I cynically assumed I'd unwittingly downloaded a Trojan horse.

Curious, I explored why the site owners had homed in on me, offering what they enthusiastically claimed was "the opportunity to explore awesome conversations".

Unfortunately, the awesome conversations appear to be entirely in code.

Something called "The Meteor Book" has appeared, with a stream of Twitter-type messages, such as, "Seems this template change needs to be updated for B3".

Apparently, I've been invited into the conversation because I'm a follower of somebody called Sacha Greif. This is intriguing news to me, as I've never followed anyone.

Sacha turns out to be the co-author of "The Meteor Book" and has worked with start-ups with equally obscure names, such as Hipmunk and Rubymotion.

Sacha's co-author, Tom, is apparently distinguished for being the maintainer of something known as "The Atmosphere Repository".

With an open invitation to purchase "The Meteor Book" and even buy the T-shirt, I would have the opportunity to explore ways of managing something even more mind-boggling, called "GitHub".

I also nervously wondered why having access to something called "Destructoid" would improve my ability to communicate benignly with my fellow man.

Disqus Digests, like most social communication programmes, leads back to California, and appears to offer bright young cybernauts the opportunity to market games and other merchandise.

A short video features one enthusiastic nerd explaining how he's being paid monthly by DD while he lolls around on a giant orange beanbag in his sneakers and jeans.

Apparently he has produced some computer game involving monsters and robots and is now becoming wealthy, thanks to Disqus Digests.

Sensing the hand of opportunity reaching out to me from across the Pacific, I cried out enviously to the caregiver, "I want to be like him, lazing around on a beanbag in Palo Alto, while the money pours in".

The caregiver, as usual, put a finger on the problem. "First of all, you'd have to learn about denormalisation and something called Hot Code Reload, plus of course, get to grips with understanding GitHub."

"Perhaps my nine-year-old could help steer me through any technical learning difficulties," I responded.

"I don't see that as your insurmountable problem," the caregiver continued gravely. "It's getting out of a beanbag at your age that might be beyond you."