People who know me well know that I am not the biggest fan of social media.

In fact, people who don’t know me well still have a pretty good idea that I am not the biggest fan of social media, because I have written about that in this space several times before.

It is not that I am anti-social. I am a pretty social guy. Heck, my job is to be social. Every week I go out and meet new people and sometimes interview them and write stories about them.

In fact, that is the best part of my job.

Those stories are for a printed newspaper, of course, but they also get put on our website and can then be shared on social media, of course.

There are a couple of things that I don’t like about social media. One is that it sometimes is not very social. It can be someone blasting away at something – or someone – they don’t like. And they can do that blasting in some very one sided, down right nasty terms.

My other issue is that people can put anything they want on social media. It does not have to be true. They can make it all up. It can be totally fake, and I think a lot of it is.

It is very worrisome to me as a news guy that some people get their “news” from social media and read all these comments and believe it all.

Meanwhile, legitimate real news organizations, like TV network newscasts and well-regarded newspapers are the ones being called fake news.

There is one more thing that bothers me about social news. People must be spending hours and hours scrolling through all of their various accounts. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, X, and a whole lot more that I am barely aware of.

How many hours a day must people be sitting and staring at their computer or phone screens and scrolling away?

I don’t know. I think I have better things to do with the 24 hours that I have been given each day.

I may not be the only one who thinks that way.

There are parents and some experts who are warning about the need to limit children’s amount of screen time – particularly with social media. Because kids can be nasty to others on social media.

Recently I saw where one group of parents have even taken a drastic retro step towards this idea. They have taken away their children’s cell phones and replaced them with, get this, a landline phone.

Yes, for real. Their kids have to talk to their friends on a landline phone. And, get this too, the kids seem to like it and have actually embraced it.

As someone who grew up with one phone in the house (that was on a ‘party’ line) and only one TV (which only got three stations) I think it might be a good idea to go retro. We got outside more, did more things with our friends, and sometimes only talked to them in school.

We also had time for reading and hobbies and playing games – real games, not video games where you are alone in your room.

I can’t say that I totally hate all social media, although I do bash it once in a while. I think there is some good about it. With friends and family spread out all over the country, it sometimes is nice to see what they have been up to. I just don’t always take the time to check out Snap Chat or Facebook or TikTok or Instagram or wherever it is that they have posted their photo or info.

There are those who take the time to check all that, I have learned.

This past summer the Southern Minnesota Museum of Natural History in Blue Earth started a social media campaign to promote the new museum. We hired a smart, young person (McKenna Dutton) to do this for us, because those of us on the board of directors are all a bit older and not up to speed with all those ways of being on social media.

McKenna would create a video and post it and within hours, especially on TikTok, it would get nearly 1,000 views. Now I don’t know where those 1,000 people are, or if any of them would ever wander into this museum in Blue Earth, Minnesota, but it still was interesting that so many people would look at the videos.

So, I guess I have to admit there is some benefit to social media.

But, I also still see a lot of things not so good about it. Especially the false and nasty things that seem to be on it a lot of the time. And I wonder how many of those comments are computer generated and from an account that is fake.

But then, I guess I am a member of the older generation who grew up without all this. We were able to go to a restaurant and eat a nice meal and not have to take a picture of the plate of food and post it for everyone to see.

Ah, those were the good old days.