Some good points here about social media from The Generalist…
When you are bathed in a monoculture, even one warring with itself, you begin to adopt its stances as your own.
The more your data and algorithm adhere to the dominant monoculture, the less you will have to offer.
Some self-experiments for the start of 2025
â Read on thegeneralist.substack.com/p/monk-mode
Tedâs entire newsletter is a worthy read here, but this part about new research indicating that the current genertion of young people growing up in a phone-based culture (globally) is doing real harm and damage. It makes me think back to the tobacco industry trying to pretend that cigarettes donât hurt people or the petroleum companies hiding the neurological effects of lead-infused gasoline and so on…
Crisis in the Culture: An Update – by Ted Gioia:
Haidt declared victory on social media: âThere are now multiple studies showing that a heavily phone-based childhood changes the way the adolescent brain wires up, in many ways including cognitive control and reward valuation.â
We still need more research. But we can already see that weâre dealing with actual physiological decline, not just punditsâ opinions.
At this point, the debate isnât over whether this is happening. Instead we now need to gauge the extent of the damage, and find ways of protecting people, especially kids.
The disappearing Insta grid – One Thing:
Snapchat and BeReal understood this preference shift long ago. And now, scrubbing your feed is a way of taking some control back, refusing to put your past on display. Itâs a design choice. Embracing negative space. Making anti-brand the brand. Refusing to participate in the popularity contest and the attention economy.
I know⊠letâs go back to blogging on our own domains (no, seriously)!
I donât want to end this on a bummer note, but I do think itâs probably time to accept that we have reached the limitations of the social web as itâs currently constructed. Itâs likely that TikTok was the last âsocialâ platform and even more likely that all the behaviors that we can do on these platforms have been mapped out already. We can rearrange them and try them out in different orders and react to slight algorithm tweaks, but this is it. This is how people will behave as long the companyâs that own and operate the web continue to do so. And itâs probably time to start imagining something else â no, not AI â before we forget how to do it.
The Museum of You â Herbert Lui:
I see a lot of discussion on how people miss blogs, and RSS, and internet culture before what we call Web 2.0 (social media, platforms, ecommerce, etc.) came along and wiped it away.Â
The best way to pay homage is to bring it backâto set up our own blogs that we control, to preserve our own libraries of content in multiple places so they donât disappear with social media, to actively document our lives the way we miss and the way we would want to be remembered. We can choose a responsibility, every day, to collect the best of what came before us, to embody it, and to preserve it by sharing its charms with other people.
Much agreed, and this is one of the reasons Iâve kept my own blog and podcast here since 2006. I thought back then, âWhat if these awesome new tools like MySpace (or early Twitter) somehow go away or fall into the hands of the wrong leaders?âÂ
I read previous posts and thoughts here occasionally and marvel at how naive, bold, brave, or afraid I was at various points in my life. Now looking back on this Museum of Me, I can glimpse previous iterations of my own self and perceptions and not just remember but learn.Â
Blogs like this, however silly they may seem in the face of social media apps, are powerful places!
The Buffet Is Back in the U.S., From Las Vegas to Small Southern Towns – The New York Times:
âThe buffet is designed so the TikTokers and the Instagrammers can make their pretty pictures of the food,â Ms. Orner said.
Artificial Intelligence might usher in something like a return to curated web experiences. This article is presented in a very âanti-AIâ posture, but it also raises the idea that what happens to the web after AI completely saturates online content (and discovery through search and googling, etc.) is a realization that humans are pretty good at curating stuff for other humans.
Hence, making a Spotify playlist for someone special is still just as engaging as when we used cassette tapes in the 80s and 90s to do the same.
My personal wish is that we all go back to the notion of personal blogging or at least small and niche online communities with things like guestbooks (go sign mine⊠just set up today!) and Blogrolls to point us in interesting directions rather than relying on TikTokâs algorithms…
AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born – The Verge:
This is the same complaint identified by Stack Overflowâs mods: that AI-generated misinformation is insidious because itâs often invisible. Itâs fluent but not grounded in real-world experience, and so it takes time and expertise to unpick. If machine-generated content supplants human authorship, it would be hard â impossible, even â to fully map the damage. And yes, people are plentiful sources of misinformation, too, but if AI systems also choke out the platforms where human expertise currently thrives, then there will be less opportunity to remedy our collective errors.
There’s no denying that social media has made it easier to post online, but if you want to make sure that your own voice is being heard, get a domain, then purchase some web hosting and start a blog…
Reddit is introducing controversial charges to developers of third-party apps, which are used to browse the social media platform.
But this has resulted in a backlash, with moderators of some of the biggest subreddits making their communities private for 48 hours in protest.
Almost 3,500 subreddits will be inaccessible as a result.
Source: Reddit blackout: Subreddits to go private on Monday – BBC News
Anyone who has read my writings and ravings here since 2006 will know I feel this exact way.
Buy that domain name. Carve your space out on the web. Tell your stories, build your community, and talk to your people. It doesnât have to be big. It doesnât have to be fancy. You donât have to reinvent the wheel. It doesnât need to duplicate any space that already exists on the web â in fact, it shouldnât. This is your creation. Itâs your expression. It should reflect you.
Bring back personal blogging in 2023. We, as a web community, will be all that much better for it.
Source: Bring back personal blogging – The Verge
Good read.
I had something happen along these lines when I lost my Instagram and Facebook accounts after being compromised through a connected service with a bad password. There was no recompense or way to gain access to those networks that had been built up and maintained over years and years. Luckily, I had backups of the actual content, but all of those connections and gardens of interaction were immediately plowed up. I had been gardening on someone else’s land.
It’s yet another reason I’ve been focusing more on content and actual thoughts here and using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc, for more tertiary purposes. This domain and blog are my canonical place on the web.
Go and do likewise.
Iâm constantly on the fence about pre-planning or pre-scheduling too many marketing posts ahead of time on social media. Itâs handy, for sure. However, given that events happen without warning, there are real risks that could make whatever youâre trying to do look incredibly out-of-touch.
However, there is a benefit to having a month (or week) long agenda of posts to help keep you or your team on track. Social media is a platform that often rewards spontaneity, and you should be building that into marketing efforts. But it would be best if you had a foundation on which to grow, and a good plan can get you there.
For example, I stumbled upon a free monthlong planner for social media posts in January 2023 from Plann. There is any number of these out there. Still, the benefit is that these calendars take away the guesswork and produce dozens of content pieces that can be used across social networks, promotional materials, videos, recaps, etc.Â
So spend some time thinking and planning while allowing your marketing efforts to remain responsive and flexible in 2023!
