Tag: social media
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Tools of the moment
An ongoing series Not Xwitter. I already stopped using the platform but only recently did the full delete. Grateful to the new ownership for making it easy to kick the habit after 15 years. Not Goodreads. Did the full delete of my Goodreads account as well. This might seem counterintuitive for a librarian and bookish…
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Life’s too short to read books you don’t like
Back in June, I took an early morning walk with my 1 year old and had the sudden inspiration to whip up an Instagram Reel on a topic I care deeply about: telling people that it’s OK to stop reading books you don’t like: This might sound familiar because I’ve done a similar one before.…
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Do better than ‘Do better’
I’ve been on social media long enough to have accumulated a few pet peeves about how people interact online. Here’s one: the phrase “do better.” Much like its cousin “wake up”, “do better” signals a smug self-satisfaction that will justifiably be met with defensiveness by the accused and therefore a very low chance they will…
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Tools of the moment
An ongoing series Threads. I hopped onto the new app with the Cinema Sugar account on Wednesday evening when it was first going public. It’s been fun goofing off about movies and interacting with people in a new venue. Not so fun is the feed full of random accounts you don’t even follow. Hoping/assuming that…
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Auto-Tune the News
About once a week something makes me think of a line from one of the (NSFW) Auto-Tune the News videos that had a viral moment way back in social media’s halcyon days of 2009. Any mention of Iowa or climate change reminds me of #2, the T-Pain-esque bop: And any mention of the phrase “God…
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Three principles for a pleasant inbox
I open 100% of the (non-spam) emails I get, and enjoy doing so. Here’s how, and why. 1. One inbox to rule them all Pretty much as soon as Gmail debuted the Promotions and Social tabs I turned them off, leaving me with a single inbox that almost always has close to zero emails. I…
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Please (don’t) clap
Robin Sloan: Twitter’s only conclusion can be abandonment: an overdue MySpace-ification. I am totally confident about this prediction, but that’s an easy confidence, because in the long run, we’re all MySpace-ified. The only question, then, is how many more possibilities will go unexplored? How much more time will be wasted? Wishful descriptions of Twitter as…
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Under the bookfluence
Call me Influencer. (just kidding, please don’t) I don’t use TikTok but I’ve started making Instagram Reels for work and have grown to appreciate the format, however much of a time-suck it can be. There’s lots of creative, funny, and relatable ones out there if you can navigate the ever-changing algorithm. I figured the easiest…
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Are You Paying Attention? On ‘The Social Dilemma’ and ‘My Octopus Teacher’
I don’t have to go looking for synchronicity because it always finds me. This time it was on Netflix. The other day I watched Netflix’s new docu-drama The Social Dilemma (trailer) based on the recommendation from a friend and a lively text thread about its implications. The film’s thesis is that social networks are engineered…
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They podcast me back in
“If your mind is forever filled with the voices of others, how do you know what you think about anything? Pulling attention apart is pulling a mind apart.” After watching this video by CGP Grey about attention (h/t C.J. Chilvers), I deleted over half of my podcast subscriptions. I’ve culled the list before, but like…
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My home screen
I’m always intrigued by other people’s smartphone home screens. Which apps make the dock? How is everything organized, if at all? Do they have 10,000+ unread emails like a crazy person? Here’s mine for you to judge: Messages, Podcasts, Google Maps, Safari, and WordPress are probably the most used. Safari used to be in the…
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How I’ve made my social media better
Here are some browser extensions and tools I’ve been using to make my experience on the Big Three social networks better: Twitter Since 2012 I’ve been using the extension Fix Twitter [update: now defunct] to swap the right and left columns to put the feed back on the left, as it was pre-2012. Mostly cosmetic,…
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Ursula Le Guin on the ‘media golem’
A pox upon me for never having read Ursula Le Guin before she died last week. I’ll get right on that, as her reputation is high among many different kinds of readers. Before diving into her novels, though, I encountered her blog (an 88 year old blogging!) on which last year she posted “Constructing the Golem”, pretty…
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Just don’t look, just don’t look
In the “Attack of the 50-Foot Eyesores” story from The Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror VI”, giant advertisement characters come to life and terrorize Springfield: Lisa goes to the ad agency that created those advertising characters, and an executive suggests the citizens stop paying attention to the monsters as they are advertising gimmicks, and attention is…
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If the President Tweets It
When the National Review is calling Trump out, it’s worth reading: [Trump’s] tweets, however, are exposing something else in many of Trump’s friends and supporters — an extremely high tolerance for dishonesty and an oft-enthusiastic willingness to defend sheer nonsense. Yes, I know full well that many of his supporters take him “seriously, not literally,” but…
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Let me exhort you
Alan Jacobs: Let me exhort you, people: close Twitter and read a book. Take delight in something well-made, well-made because the author loved her task and sought to bring her best intellectual resources to bear on her work. Take delight in words crafted to increase the world’s store of intelligence, to share what the author…
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How Tweet It Is
At the beginning of December I had my wife change my Twitter password so I couldn’t access it. I’ve learned that I’m a cold turkey guy. Maybe I have some elements of an addictive personality, because for things like social media that act as mini dopamine triggers, I can’t use them moderately. I’m either on…
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Make Yourselves Whole Again: On ‘Dataclysm’ and ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’
In a sloppy but understandable attempt at satire, Justine Sacco tweeted: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” Then she got on a long plane ride to South Africa. During the flight her tweet went viral, enraging the easily enraged bastions of social media and catapulting the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet around…