Me And The Socials

The way I have started dealing with most social media is by taking skims over it, like using a net to clean crap out of a turtle tank. I will deep dive on a subject on sites that don’t employ clickbaity headlines to snag your attention … sites that are closer to the notion of good old fashioned journalism, but which may not necessarily think of themselves that way. Fact based sites.

I wish I could avoid these headlines totally, but the algorithim delivers them into your feed. Even with filter that weeds stuff out on Facebook the volume batters and overwhelms the capacity to stop it.

Fake News does have some roots in reality, but it is not the sole plant growing in the garden of journalism, and it is not something limited to the left or the right. You shouldn’t burn down the institute of journalism because of those who chose not to practice it in an ethical way. Biased journalism, journalism that caters to special interests, or which presents things through a filter that obfuscates reality, is by its very nature antithetical to journalism. That’s what lands on me.

Democratisation of distribution is not a bad thing ever — it makes this and every project I have done in the last few decades possible, but you have to allow that a medium built on access for everyone means that the opinions of everyone have the chance to shine and flourish. In the realm of free speech does hate speech need to be allowed a chance to show its true colours? Part of me wants to squash it, but part of me knows it is an inescapable binary, at least in public spaces; sometimes even in the spaces you craft yourself.

Anything worth having is not easily won. Substack feels like a different place to Facebook — it recalls something of the Myspace blogosphere for me. I have plenty of my own websites too, but you have to leverage public platforms and built-in audiences if you can — your reach can be much larger than your marketing dollars when you first start out would ever allow.

I want to build my own online cul-de-sac though, and maybe it will have to be some kind of distributed network deal — where the heart is Substack, and the peripheral parts of the body are my own websites, and the brain is something like Asana or even Buffer, and I just find a way to spin all the plates.

Some of the groups I was in have dislocated to Discord. I am not cool with being exploited quite so much by people like Zuckerberg. Twitter is a feed dump I try to dip into once in a while, but it’s hard to find something that is everything.

I want people to find and follow me into these pocket universes that are staked out with my own flags. I’d love to hear where you have staked out your own territories.