Are you sure these slide evenings were as entertaining and impressive as your remember?
I've never heard anything positive about them until your comment, up until now they've always been the subject of boredom jokes.
I've never heard anything positive about them until your comment, up until now they've always been the subject of boredom jokes.
The point I'm making is that the boredom joke about the slide evenings was social etiquette and care for other people's feelings preventing intelligent, well-mannered people from being anything but polite. The joke was indeed always on the slide-shower, and it was a bitter-sweet empathic one. I see a modern parallel.
Even better, you may have friends who are not overly selective about what they share, but still share something worthwhile every now and then. With social media, it’s fairly painless to pick our the worthwhile pieces. In a slide evening, I’d have been bored to death.
I suppose I would say two things, one serious and one silly:
The serious is that I actually do find it harder and harder "to pick out the worthwhile pieces" in social media. I'm adding more people, they're all posting more, and the feeds are getting messier and messier. I don't think slide evenings started as snoreathons, and there must have been a novelty period before it all got tedious. If there was a turning point then I feel we're not far from the equivalent one with our social media photo-flooding.
The silly is that at the slide evening I would be plied with wine and...well, in those days I suppose Twiglets? Right this second, I would gladly sit through an hour or two of Machu Pichu (OK, let's be realistic: Cornwall) in exchange for a comfortable chair and the quaffing of a few glasses ;)
I’m far less active in Twitter, where I seem to easily get overwhelmed by a flood of small updates, or G+, which seems to attract highly prolific writers.