Tag: internet

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man smoking pipe at a typewriter

(photo credit: NC State Archives on flickr)

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in this world.

Margaret Mead, quoted in New York Times, 9 Aug. 1964

If you had told me five years ago that my main source of news would be email newsletters, I would have thought you mad. If you had told me I would also be paying to subscribe to these newsletters, I would have walked away laughing. Obviously, e-newsletters have been around for decades, but the meteoric rise in platforms like Substack was not on my bingo card pre-2019. So I thought I would share what’s currently coming into my inbox on the regular in the hopes that you might find them as enjoyable as I do! 

What I pay for

Culture Study: This was the first paid subscription I bought. I heard AHP speak at the 2022 CALM conference and immediately realized that she is someone who deeply understands her audience. An author, podcaster, and gardener, she has an incredible critical eye and the ability to make any subject interesting. I love everything she writes. 

Content Prompt [referral link]: Written by Meghan Kowalski, an outreach librarian working in DC, this is a daily list of ideas for social media content creation. I heard Meghan speak at last year’s Library Marketing and Communications conference and was so impressed that I signed up for her newsletter while she was still speaking. It’s a simple, but useful format that also includes prompting questions that I’ve occasionally used in my personal journalling as well.

Link in Bio: This was a recommendation by Meghan. Rachel Karten is a social media consultant who writes about current trends. As someone who only uses social media for work, I don’t often encounter trending content outside my industry, so this is a helpful way for me to know what’s up. Subscribers also get access to a Discord that seems to be mostly populated by social media professionals, so I get to feel like an industry insider. 

Everything else

Here’s a list of all the other newsletters I read regularly. I’m just at the limit of what I have time to read each week, but I do try to read all of these in full when they arrive.

What I’m reading

Obviously from the above, you can tell I already spend a not insignificant amount of time reading, but this last week in particular I was feeling nostalgic about the early days of the web. Kyle Chayka, writing for the New Yorker, basically described my exact experience of the web from the 1990s through 2010s. If that makes you long for a simpler time (and smaller web), check out the Diagram Website. I’ve lost myself in here for hours. Need a soundtrack while you surf? Open a tab for Infraordinary FM, an AI-generated broadcast of mundane happenings around the globe.

Garden updates

close up of a young plant

I’m at the end of the winter growing season here in zone 10, so I’m not putting in any seeds yet. Instead, I’ve transplanted in various leafy greens. Once the heat comes back, these won’t last long but it should provide for the occasional salad for the next few weeks.

Links to the past

  • 1 year ago: I was knee-deep into a research project on burnout in academia that, rather than resulting in a publication, made me realize I was clinically in burnout mode. So I dropped it.
  • 4 years ago: I was turning off all notifications on my phone and finally starting to prioritize sleep.
  • 10 years ago: I was making valentines for our students in the library.

Overheard online

“Strong’s Concordance” would be a pretty cool name for a band.

@hotdogsladies on Mastodon

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Purple pansy from my garden.

This year, I want to change the way I experience the internet. In both architecture and rhetoric, we talk about ductus: simply put, the way in which the pathway influences our experience of the content. Imagine entering a cathedral and moving from a small, enclosed narthex to the nave and into the crossing. The experience of the space is very different than if you had entered from the porch’s side entrance.

I want to forcibly change my experience of the web by building a new path. A slower path. A quieter path. At the risk of sounding like an aging technologist who first surfed the World Wide Web from a dial-up modem (which I did), I want to recreate to the extent possible that experience. Fewer inputs. Smaller circles. Less connection.

Social media offers us a great, almost irresistible level of connection, but it never stops moving. I want to find space to disconnect, reflect, and muddle about. I want richer content with less focus on personal brands. I want cool takes. I want the ability to disconnect for days without consequence. I don’t want the pressure of real-time information.

These are some of the initial steps I’m taking to create a quieter internet for myself:

  • remove social media apps from my mobile device
  • stop posting to social media (I may allow myself 2-3 tweets per week)
  • set up an RSS reader on my desktop machine
  • subscribe to a small, manageable selection of feeds
  • when I feel the urge to surf, scroll or wander, start at metafilter, LibraryThing, or a random wikipedia page
  • spend time curating my bookmarks (possibly revisiting old ones)
  • share my thoughts and findings here

Some say the heyday of blogging is over. Google Reader is dead (may it live on forever in our memory) and many of the great blogs of the late aughts and early teens have gone silent, but it is still possible to find quality, long(er)-form content out there. This new year, I want to go back on an RSS-based diet.

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“Our current version of the internet lives and breathes off a currency of human attention. With the success and failure of many internet companies predicated on how much of a person’s time they can capture.” Jesse Weaver, Instagram and the cult of the attention web.

After stepping away from Facebook and Twitter for a month and subsisting on a diet of chronologically, self-customized feeds instead of algorithmily-defined ones, I realized how empty much of that content is. Also, I miss Google Reader.

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In my most private moments, I still dream of and hope for an Internet from February 8, 1996:

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

Twenty years later, we are in a much different place.

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“I’d read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I’d begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was “doing to me,” so I could fight back. But the internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are.”

Source: I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet

 

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“Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we’ll see or hear about today. The internet is like a lens which focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination. It compresses the unlikely into a small viewable band of everyday-ness. As long as we are online – which is almost all day many days – we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal.”

Source: The Technium