This is Publishing?

I’ve spent the last few days wrestling with the internet on various levels.  I was trying to get an account on Instagram for my husband, because he’s installing new work at my friend Deborah’s garden, it looks really good, and we need to publicize it, right?  I was also turning his website into a blog (www.michaelwhetman.com), with the longer-term goal of publishing posts on Instagram.  Plus I’ve been trying to add a “subscribe” function to my own website (www.nancyannroth.com).  All this involved Facebook, because Facebook owns Instagram.  I got involved in an experiment my cousin Tom was doing on Facebook, a little test to whether anyone would actually read a post without a photograph.  Some did.  I read some recent posts from our relatives, one of them, I’m sorry to report, was a shameless, embarrassing “Happy Birthday, President Trump” message — I didn’t want to know that; a childhood friend and neighbour from my home town in the USA wrote that my mother had taught us (us being kids?) to “love classical music at an early age”. I can’t remember her ever even listening to classical music.

Anyway, I’m old.  These “platforms” provide me with hours and hours of steady, spirit-corroding frustration.  I just want to say that Facebook sucks, Instagram may be worse, Twitter, well, what can you say?  With some exceptions, they are silos full of the sheerest twaddle, stored on servers that are NOT clouds, but tons of metal in the Pacific, heating up the water, killing beautiful plants and animals and reducing people’s capacity to write, speak, think. 
Of course we do still have print…but who reads that?