Good luck online, Class of 2017

Parents on Facebook are posting pictures of their progeny clad in caps and gowns, so it must be time for our annual parody of a graduation speech:

Today as I stand here before you, an aging man in the autumn of his career, who after 35 years in journalism misplaced “an aging man” so it applies to “you” instead of me in this sentence, I pause to check my wireless device.

Holy crap! Look at this Facebook post! It says: “Donald Trump trolls Gal Gadot! Her response? HILARIOUS!”

From here this speech could take many turns. It could explain to your parents who “Gal Gadot” is, and delve into whether her Wonder Woman movie character truly is a feminist icon, or just a one-piece warrior swimsuit sex object for cartoon geeks who have to dress like Captain America to meet chicks.

Were there but one point I could tweet here that you might remember, it would be: Quit clicking on that crap.

Unless I wrote it, I mean. I could use the online traffic.

It’s not just that celebrity gossip and petty politics are pointless distractions. It’s also that clickbait designed to grab your attention often wastes not only your time but your emotional energy:

You must mourn the child killed in a shocking murder five states away, or be outraged the suspect got off light for lack of evidence. You must reply to a post that offends your politics, then waste two hours angrily trading arguments and insults with people you don’t know and don’t want to.

And don’t forget that a lot of provocative posts are fake, as noted by research on last year’s election campaign, when “fake news” was all the rage, and all I could think was, “Well, if it was fake, maybe people should not have believed it.”

What’s wrong with people these days, anyway? I didn’t grow up believing everything I was told. Did they?

Maybe the difference is that people always have believed what they wanted to, leaving them prey to politicians, pyramid schemes and other scams, but they’ve not always been bombarded nonstop with bullsh- … or they’ve not always been subjected to unceasing manipulation through wireless media. Even people my age, fed hours of mindless television banter and car-radio palaver, had to turn it off sometimes.

You’re not going to turn your wireless device off now, of course, and neither am I. We can’t, usually. It is as necessary in our work today as a car or landline telephone used to be. A smartphone or tablet or laptop is why we don’t have to get into our cars and drive to the office every time the boss calls. We remotely can do work that once required being there, and we figure that’s worth the price we pay, in its intrusion upon our private lives.

But we forget that we can pay less, by reducing certain costs, in time and energy.

So look at it this way: You have to have the device, to manage your work. You don’t have to let it manipulate you. You’re supposed to use it. It’s not supposed to use you.

Next time you’re online and see some clickbait social media post that asks a question it doesn’t answer or ends in all capital letters and an exclamation point (“HILARIOUS!”, “LIBERALS ARE OUTRAGED!”, “SIGN THE PETITION!”), skip it.

Just do whatever you got online to do, and then go do something else. Go for a walk, read a book, play with the kids, plant a garden. If they need you at work, they’ll send a text.

Give that a try, and maybe when you get to be my age, you’ll have saved an awful lot of time. Or at least found better ways to waste it.

Also the part about Donald Trump trolling Wonder Woman was fake news, by the way, so don’t try to look that up online.

This story was originally published May 7, 2017 at 2:42 PM with the headline "Good luck online, Class of 2017."