|||
If you haven’t heard, we’re so back. Bluesky is bringing people in faster than the fast lanes at Disney.
I’ve had to take a step back the past few years with writing about anything because I wanted to better understand my purpose. It’s been a busy year for me, so I’ve had lots of things to reflect on throughout the year. Now that things are settling down, I’m having an opportunity to really reckon with where to share, what to share, and what I hope to get from the exchange.
When your thoughts are going to be used by water-wasting lie machines, you have to think critically about what you’re sharing and why you’re sharing it.
Generative AI and the lack of guardrails about what content machines can ingest are really making me think twice about what I share. I stopped using Facebook years ago, save for the occasional “proof of life” post for distant family back home. But Instagram has been a useful place for those weak ties across my life that I’m keeping in less touch with, or as an excuse to talk to people who I don’t see regularly.
The problem is, a private feed really cuts off what your connections see, and posting regularly doesn’t guarantee your content stays within your orbit. Maybe it’s less important for photos of myself or random publicly available things I might share. It’s more harmful when it starts to impact strangers, friends, and others who are part of your photos.
Gen Z perfected the Instagram photo dump, and there’s something nice about having a chronicle or archive of your life across the years in real-ish time. It’s how I’ve chosen to use the app since the pandemic, mostly because I remember the slog of those months where I wondered if we’d ever do the sort of normal things we once took for granted. (I live in a state that was pretty serious about the pandemic; perhaps I’d have felt differently if I lived in Oklahoma or something…)
Back to social media. I think I’ve never felt more inclined to go back to good old-fashioned blogging than I am right now. I’ve been blogging since at least 2003, so the medium is very familiar to me. Writing for “no audience” isn’t particularly bothersome, either. Half the time, writing online is really about collecting a compendium of my own thoughts and providing myself a structured way to track my ideas and force myself to write about them.
In a world where we’re commodifying other people’s ideas into an aggregated machine without credit, it’s vital to figure out how to rapidly get ideas into the world with some consistency. Microblogging platforms used to be a decent way to do that, but I’m not convinced that jostling with strangers for a microsecond of their attention is a resilient way to translate ideas from my head to paper.
So I’m going to see if writing here and sharing ideas outward works better.
Drafted while listening to: Gloria by Kendrick Lamar
