Why I never became a social media star

Hey guys! I've been offline for so long. It was intended to be just an internet free (or internet less) time while I was doing my exams, but then I started having a series of painful issues with my internet provider. I won't bore you with the details but I was offline for three weeks. Don't worry though I have heaps of amazing posts I'm so excited to be able to share with you do social media personalities know how fake and ridiculous that sounds when they say it. 

Who speaks like this? No one talking to people they actually care about, that's for sure. I don't walk in to visit my nieces saying "hi girls, I have some free time I can't wait to share with you!". But social media stars are always just so thrilled to finally be able to share the next big reveal with us - and it's always some resoundingly pastel piece of news, like their new spring range of planner printables or smoothie recipe collection. I guess that's why I'm not a social media star, I'd never be able to muster the requisite amount of enthusiasm for making my living flogging tat. 

Social networks are becoming the new Home Shopping Channel. Affiliate links are everywhere. Every lifestyle blogger has her own range of yoga pants, or stickers, or six week organise your life course. No longer do you have to merely sit at home envying these impossibly fit and organised lifestyles - you can buy a tiny slice of them, so you can feel envious and guilty about wasting money. (Considering where so much social media browsing gets done, and where our guts so often churn with envy and anger, there must be a market out there for the social media personality who sells their own range of toilet paper. I mean, apart from Gwyneth Paltrow*).

I have retooled my blog though, after people let me know the old template wasn't rendering properly. And I did miss out on posting about the biggest event of the year - that the incredibly expensive, non binding postal survey on same sex marriage showed pretty much the same result as all the other polls and surveys on same sex marriage in recent years.

Seriously though, I remember complaining way back when I started this blog that same sex marriage seemed like a no brainer. That was 2004 though, and same sex marriage was seen as a fringe issue, where it was seen at all; legal only in the Netherlands (of course), Belgium and a few Canadian provinces. 2004 was the year of the Marriage Amendment Bill, which acted to formally ban same sex marriage and mandated that there be a little reminder in the service of every civil wedding that marriage is only for the straights. It was also the year of the first of 22 failed same sex marriage bills into the Australian parliament, introduced by Michael Organ of the Greens back when the Greens - who voted yes on same sex marriage every time - had only 1 Lower House MP and 2 Senators. There was no groundswell of community support, no demand; for most people, as a political issue, same sex marriage was about as important to them as subsidies for electric cars. No one's marching in the streets about it, or even thinking about it much. But if they did, most people thought, no. 

So yeah while the vote isn't binding (and of course, same sex marriage isn't legal yet) it means a huge deal that it is now officially recognised by government that this is the will of the people. And we're promised it will be a legal reality by Christmas, although maybe not considering parliament has bunked off down the beach while the surf is good.