time and headspace

Yep I'm going to talk about the show Community here too. But first... If our online social networking spaces disappeared tomorrow, where would we find our communities? Would we transition easily into irl spaces, or would we be set adrift in isolation until rehabilitated into society proper? An uncomfortable, growing trend I've noticed is that when people refer to their "communities", what they largely mean is "people who follow me" or "people who share my niche interests". Even within circles I consider to be my longtime community, and especially within creative circles, those seeking social media alternatives to Meta are most anxious that their "communities" won't be there, generally meaning the followings and audiences they've built their livelihoods around.   I get it. The capitalist structures we're forced to navigate, plus the realities of our online age, have conditioned us to rely on transactional engagement. It was abo...

Trying to keep up with the fall of Western democracy is exhausting. Tracing the web of the US's technocratic takeover is like walking a tightrope over a pit of conspiratorial lava. It's easy to feel crazy. I follow some brilliant tech voices on Bluesky. When the platform first broke through the top crust of platform giants it was, in my eyes, a historical upset within the order of conventional social media. Not just a new platform, but an entirely new model of social media —user-owned data, user-controlled algorithms, freedom from advertisers—it legitimately boggled my mind that the overall reception within my comms circles was as passive as it was. It still does. If immunity to the sedative effects of social media should exist within any profession, it should damn well exist within communications. That communicators and "strategists" are still ho-humming about what open source and decentralized comms could mean for our broader systems, even now, when our comms sys...

In thinking through social media exit strategies, I decided to slow down and consider in more detail why leaving is so damn difficult for most of us. Fully aware of the irony of using the very tools I advocate against, I turned to Instagram Stories and asked a few questions about what's preventing us from leaving Instagram or Facebook; I hoped for a few responses, I received a small flood. Tapering off at 56 responses, the almost unanimous reason for not being able to leave was "work, family, connection". None of those reasons came as a surprise, but the speed and volume at which they were provided affirmed my thinking that maybe it isn't just me or you who feels pretty damn stuck right now. And reaffirmations kept coming as friends tapped through others' responses and commented they didn't expect everyone else's thoughts and feelings to reflect their own so closely; we are all indeed feeling stuck in the same game, and we all hate it. Free to leave if we ...