twitter Archives - Sam Harrelson

The Museum of Me

Sam Harrelson on December 10, 2023

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.

The best way to pay homage is to bring it back—to set up our own blogs that we control, to preserve our own libraries of content in multiple places so they don’t 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 I’ve kept my own blog and podcast here since 2006. I thought back then, “What if these awesome new tools like MySpace (or early Twitter) somehow go away or fall into the hands of the wrong leaders?”

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.

Blogs like this, however silly they may seem in the face of social media apps, are powerful places!

Threads and RIP Twitter

Sam Harrelson on July 5, 2023

Instagram Threads launched today. It’s a slicker and very nice text-based social platform. It’s basically what Twitter should have become.

I’ve used Twitter since it was TWTTR way back and had the original @sam handle in early 2006. I thought it was magical. And it was. So much of what we thought about making content on the web was changing and evolving.

Then Twitter really took off in 2006 with the tech crowd (as you can see here on this blog with all the posts tagged with “twitter”), and it was seriously magical. I remember staying in a Las Vegas hotel during a tech conference with the late great Wayne Porter when Twitter was still text-based, and him threatening to take my phone out into the desert and shoot it because it would not stop giving 40404 alerts (Twitter’s number) in early 2006.

Track was amazing. You could type “track mullins” into Twitter, and any mention of “mullins” (my hometown) would signal an alert. Amazing. I remember driving to the NASCAR race at Richmond in 2007 with my Blackberry and Twitter track set up… I had the best time.

2007 was a year of exploration. The world discovered Twitter along with social media. We elected a President in 2008 who broadcast his inauguration on social media in January 2009. It felt like we were living in the future. Twitter track, social media casts, Skype… it was all so amazing.

I made a video in early 2007 that I hastily uploaded to YouTube titled “How To Use Twitter,” which had over 2.5 million views and made me a good lump of change before I deleted it. It was the top-ranked video for Twitter at the time. Geez, I loved that platform.

Then… the 2010s happened. I won’t speak of those. But social media went in a different direction.

Now here we are with Threads by Instagram. It is clean and vibrant. It’s what Twitter could have been. But it feels empty and hollow in a way that Twitter never did. It will be a fantastic platform. Threads will completely trounce Twitter and make Elon Musk’s endeavor of purchasing and seemingly detaching Twitter from life support seem vainglorious.

But I will always hold out hope for the Bird. RIP, Twitter. You did well. You ushered in something so unique.

Now may we all return to our own blogs and our own places of content creation and learn the lessons we needed to learn about trusting in the altruism of large corporations when it comes to our human outputs (and why you shouldn’t).

What Happens to the Web Now?

Sam Harrelson on June 27, 2023

Artificial Intelligence might usher in something like a return to curated web experiences. This article is presented in a very “anti-AI” 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 TikTok’s 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 Overflow’s mods: that AI-generated misinformation is insidious because it’s often invisible. It’s 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 — impossible, even — 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.

How You Frame Content Determines How You Perceive It

Sam Harrelson on June 16, 2023

I do love Epictetus’s Enchiridion!

τῶν ὄντων τὰ μέν ἐστιν ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν, τὰ δὲ οὐκ ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν should be the opening line of every textbook, Driver’s License manual, Facebook user agreement, and marriage certificate as we move through life. It’s the opening lines of Epictetus’ Handbook (“Some things are up to us, and some are not up to us.”).

Plato, TikTok… skydiving? Yale’s Gendler gives ancient texts a modern spin | YaleNews:

We spent about half a class discussing a pair of images, both of which featured the Serenity Prayer: one was a delicate ceramic plate where the text was surrounded by morning glories and puppy dogs, and the other was the same text in the form of a bicep tattoo surrounded by American flags and tanks. Epictetus’s point is that how you frame content determines how you perceive it. And here we had, with the text of Epictetus, two cases of literal frames, one of which made the text seem gentle and available to those who might feel soothed by it, and the other of which made it seem macho and available to those who self-conceive in that way. So that conversation offered three different weavings of meta in the same place.

Planning Out Social Media in 2023

Sam Harrelson on December 30, 2022

I’m constantly on the fence about pre-planning or pre-scheduling too many marketing posts ahead of time on social media. It’s handy, for sure. However, given that events happen without warning, there are real risks that could make whatever you’re 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.

So spend some time thinking and planning while allowing your marketing efforts to remain responsive and flexible in 2023!