Tag: Twitter

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Writing

Late Autumn Changes

Selfie taken Dec. 4, 2023.

Yesterday I updated my profile picture across much of my internet presence. The 2011 image I had been using was taken in our garden by my spouse. That I’m now choosing a selfie is a sign of the times, the meaning of which is to be determined. Eventually the new image will be propagated throughout my accounts. I felt it was time for a change. An indoor shot in lieu of a garden image is indicative only of the season in which it was taken. The books in the background? Don’t make too much of those as it was a setting of convenience. In December it’s time to move most activities indoors and I spend a lot of each day in my writing room where there are shelved books.

The more impactful change is deactivating my X account on Nov. 22 after 15 years on the platform. That, combined with becoming more active on Threads decreased my personal mental tension almost immediately. I’ll miss certain people and accounts from X, yet the clean break will serve me longer term. So far, so good with Threads. There is so much more positive engagement on Threads it’s hard to believe that vibe will persist. In any case, there’s no going back to X.

I think the myth of the “big account” sustains X. That is, folks there feel like all the key players for their conversations remain. Likewise Threads in particular, but other new microblogging sites as well, have a paucity of news accounts. Some great news and commentary folk from X are moving or setting up accounts on other microblogging platforms, yet don’t post a lot. X is not dead, but gonna die, I predict, once news and political accounts abandon it. For now, I have newspaper subscriptions to get news when I need it. If I get desperate, there is always radio and cable television to backstop me.

As the year winds down, it’s time for budgeting as well as determining if this life in Big Grove Township is sustainable. Living on a fixed income has been challenging. I hope we can make it this way for a long while. Sadly, in American society, life is more often about financial numbers than fulfilling our wants and needs. This blog is an attempt to change that.

Thanks for reading.

Categories
Living in Society

Changing My Socials

Geese hanging around, waiting to fly south, Nov. 22, 2023.

Stars were bright at 4:45 a.m. despite a neighbor’s holiday lights interfering with the darkened sky. Orion and Ursa Major were easily evident, as were outdoors lights in the yards of distant neighbors. Points of light all jumbled together to create a personal galaxy. So began a day of cooking for us and countless others scattered across the landscape. It is American Thanksgiving and eating well is a main part of the holiday.

Shortly after Threads launched on July 5, 2023, I signed up for an account. I deactivated my Twitter account yesterday after giving Threads a thorough test drive, investigating the consequences of switching, and saying my goodbyes to those left on the decimated platform who still followed me. I’ll be fine. It was time to choose and I could not adapt to the social media platform Twitter became after its acquisition by Elon Musk.

I tried out all the social media groups to which I belong. Everything I don’t use is tucked in a bookmarks folder. Threads will be my main microblogging site. It’s different going from 1,348 followers to 100, yet I’m committed to change and already am getting to know people behind accounts on the new platform. Friends from other platforms are joining us.

This week, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and others in the administration joined Threads. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has been on the platform as long as I have. I suspect these new presences will release a number of people who have been holding back in making a change. News media and corporate accounts may be the last to arrive because they continue to prefer to present breaking news on X. They will come around, I predict, because the eyeballs will increasingly be on Threads.

So, that’s that. I’ll say no more about social media for a while.

Yesterday marked 60 years since the JFK assassination. I have living memory of that day, which means I see my former self in those moments related to the news spreading to Iowa. I am still standing with the crossing guard at Fillmore and Locust Streets when she tells me the news. I am still walking south on Fillmore toward the school. I am still sitting in the darkened classroom waiting for news as to whether the president would live. These memories seem likely to stick with me as long as I am sentient. They say the book Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK by Gerald Posner is the final word on who killed JFK. When I get time and resources to buy a copy, I will. I know how the book turns out.

I’m going outdoors to do some star gazing before heading to the kitchen. The world remains full of wonder and with our engagement, decisions can be made. We pick our battles, hopefully decide well, and move on.

Categories
Writing

Social Media Thrill is Gone

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter led me to a dismal place regarding social media. Whatever I thought I had before him no longer exists. The whole idea of social media seems bankrupt. There is some good in that, accompanied by a lot of bad.

A couple of weeks ago I logged into every social media account I have and tried posting on them at least daily to see what best served my needs. The list is as follows:

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Threads
  • X
  • Post
  • Blue Sky
  • Spoutible
  • LinkedIn

It is time to make some decisions, and here they are.

The trio of Meta applications is going to stay. I use Instagram to post an almost daily stream of photos about my life. Most of it is gardening and trail walking, with a few other things added as serendipity provides. These are all cross-posted on Facebook and are my main contribution there. A lot of people comment to me they like my photographs, both on the platforms and in real life. I publicize an occasional event on Facebook or post a link to a blog post I wrote. I also created Facebook groups to support my high school class and the home owners association where we live. Facebook and Instagram are mostly outlets for my creativity, not sources of news outside the two groups mentioned.

Threads is new with new opportunities. I plan to stick it out there until the inevitable advertising begins and things shake out as to whether or not I will develop the same kinds of relationships I had on X before Musk. In general, there are a lot of people posting as it relates to their jobs, and I fell into a place where creatives hang out and for now am enjoying the vibe of sharing less job-related stuff. The app is clean and easy to use. Because of habits developed at X, I don’t hesitate to block people/bots/porn sites as needed. I am open to staying or leaving, whichever is best for my mental health.

LinkedIn is the odd duck. I discover a lot of useful information there and connect with people I’ve known for decades. I keep saying to myself now that I’m retired and printed my LinkedIn resume there’s no further use for it. Right after that someone from a past life surfaces wanting to get in touch. Will let LinkedIn ride for now.

I haven’t been able to get any meaningful traction on Spoutible, Blue Sky, and Post. I won’t close my accounts, yet likely won’t use them much either.

I need to pull the plug on X. What keeps my account active is relationships formed over the 15 years I have been on the platform. The trouble is Musk’s politics and attitudes as manifest on the site. He is a bad egg and poisons the entire experience. Who needs that?

The one time I heard B.B. King sing Thrill is Gone live was at the Col Ballroom in my hometown of Davenport. My sister and I went together and a grade school friend from our neighborhood was the opening act. It was a great evening. I don’t know how he did it — maybe that’s part of his genius — but King put feeling into every song he sung. Here’s the money verse. May you have happy landings on social media.

You know, I'm free, free now, baby
I'm free from your spell
Oh, free, free, free now, baby
I'm free from your spell
And now that it's all over
All that I can do is wish you well
Categories
Writing

Twitter End Times

My 15 inches of blog books.

When I created this blog in 2007, I hardly knew what social media was. Twitter and Facebook existed. I soon joined Facebook more because our child was there and had moved outside Iowa. I was not on social media to promote this blog by posting links.

Over the years, I moved through numerous social media accounts. The main ones remaining are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. I developed different editorial values for each and used Twitter and LinkedIn as main vehicles to promote my blog. The various WordPress applications are by far the largest source of my views. With Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, everything is changing.

In April WordPress sent a message that the Twitter API was no longer working. That means links to my articles could not automatically post on Twitter. The problem is not fixed. I continued to manually post on Twitter yet to no avail. Traffic from Twitter to my blog dropped by 58 percent beginning in May.

Determining the cause of traffic loss is a dubious proposition. My blog has small viewership compared to most news organizations and popular blogs. Losing a few regular readers who linked from Twitter makes a difference in my world. I suspect the reason Twitter referrals declined was people were leaving the platform rather than discrimination by the designers of what became X. Whatever happened, a number of factors — loss of the API, changes by X in who saw my posts, and my readers leaving X for other platforms — Twitter became less relevant to my writing.

At the same time my referrals were in decline, National Public Radio got into a spat with X over how they were described. Because of it, they and some of their affiliates ceased posting on X in early April. What they found is it made a negligible difference in the number of views they experienced on their website. In short, it wasn’t worth the work, from a viewership standpoint, to post on the X platform. Because each reader is important to my overall viewership, my problems are not the same as NPR if my conclusion about whether it is worth the work is similar.

What does all this mean? Less time on X, more time focused on my writing, and some thought given to how I expand readership. While social media is a good place to meet and make friends and acquaintances, it is not the reason we blog. It begins with having something meaningful to say with which readers will engage. It also means working to keep readers coming back for more. I’m not sure X ever did that for me and soon it will be time to move on. In the meanwhile, I hope readers will pass along a link to my blog to a friend when they find meaningful content here. It’s an organic way of growing viewership, and may be the most enduring.

Thank you for reading my post.

Categories
Living in Society

Microblogging into 2023

Author in 2013.

The Oct. 27 acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk created turbulence on the platform. Whatever previous complaints I had about the social media network are nothing compared to the random circus of its present state. I plan to stay until the bitter end yet have taken my account private until things sort out. I learned how to delete my tweets without giving up my handle. For now, I remain.

What is Twitter? It is a microblogging site.

According to Wikipedia, “Microblogging is a form of social network that permits only short posts. They ‘allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links,’ which may be the major reason for their popularity. These small messages are sometimes called micro posts.”

Musk’s disruption of the platform has many of us reevaluating how we use social media. In part, I expanded my network to add micro posts on Post.news and Mastodon. My go-to for first post has been on Post.news. This is in addition to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. Short form posting in social media has been a way to better understand online society. There is a relationship between online and in-person society.

My main interests in micro blog sites is learning to use language more concisely, reading news stories, and finding an audience for this blog. If Journey Home were to go dark, I would likely give up most of my social media presence. There are no plans to do that yet.

I seldom return to past micro blog posts. They are an example of living in the moment and over time, my stated opinions about cultural events change. When one works alone as much as I do, we need a social outlet. While imperfect, micro blog sites provide a venue and occasional good feedback on what I posted. It’s an ersatz experience, for sure. Some days it is hard to remember that.

Categories
Living in Society

Twitter Take Four

Moon Rising

Yesterday I deleted my second Twitter account, the one I used to view profiles of people who blocked me, or those I wanted to follow without being noticed. I won’t be needing that for the time being. The account was created in 2014.

The basic premise of this series of posts about the change in ownership at Twitter remains dominant. We don’t need authoritarian oligarchs controlling our lives any more than they already are. What’s different from when I began this series is with each passing day I increasingly practiced posting on other platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Post, and Mastodon. I should be able to reduce my reliance on Twitter without missing a beat.

A main interest in social media is publicizing my writing and the writing of friends. Twitter still serves that purpose even though I took my profile private again. I don’t post links to my writing on Instagram, yet whenever I post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Post, I’m getting referrals. Such readership is appealing. I note Mastodon readers are not clicking through.

This week I reviewed each Twitter account I follow and half haven’t been active since the platform changed ownership. I unfollowed the accounts for now, we’ll see what happens. Whatever use I devise for Twitter, I’m not ready to pull the plug as long as I continue to get referrals to this website.

What has forever changed is political posting I’ve done on Twitter. The recent midterm elections were proof positive a curated Twitter account is useless in getting additional votes needed to stave off a conservative tornado. Honestly, I learned that years ago. I take this an a natural evolution of social media and not a significant problem to leave Twitter behind for politics. Writing I’ve done on this blog concerning the school board elections got significant views and circulation, far exceeding the number of people who voted in the election. If the message is right and no one else is covering something, the views will come with or without Twitter.

The next evolution of my Twitter usage is reducing accounts I follow to around 100, living off the follows gained over the last few years, and taking my profile private for now. If I want to post my latest writing, I do it on LinkedIn, Twitter, Mastodon and Post and look forward to the day when the latter two can be automated on this WordPress site. I pick special topics for Facebook, usually related to a small set of general interest subjects. What I know now is it’s the portfolio an how I use it that make social media relevant, not any specific platform.

People I know continue to use Twitter. Until I figure a way to relate with them on other platforms (or in person), I’ll stay active there, mindful the oligarch is always watching.

Categories
Writing

Toward a Productive Winter

Migratory birds on Lake Macbride.

On Monday I created a Mastodon account on the epicure.social server. It is a small space on the internet and one never knows if “small” will survive. I don’t plan to leave Twitter until the bitter end or when I croak, whichever comes first. Mastodon is my insurance policy, a place to go if I need one. If the server fails, I can move to another Mastodon server. Having networked multiple servers is a feature of Mastodon.

Christopher Bouzy, creator of BotSentinal.com posted, “Twitter will not be relevant two years from now. No platform can survive catering to one group of people, and once journalists migrate to another platform, Twitter is done. And if you think it won’t happen, ask MySpace how things are going.” Bouzy is not wrong, although he has an interest in starting a Twitter substitute platform and therefore is biased.

In any case, there seems to be significantly less Twitter traffic in my timeline. The same is true for other social media platforms I follow. People just are not feeling it right now. This is good for productivity as I move indoors. Fewer distractions facilitate a more rapid growth toward a solid 4-5 hour daily shift of writing.

Ambient temperatures are forecast to reach the low 50s this afternoon. I scheduled a walk along the lake trail. Getting enough exercise is a winter issue, especially once snow flies. I take advantage of every opportunity to exercise that presents itself.

As time moves toward winter, how we spend it changes. With thoughtful planning we can be productive and perhaps useful to others. Productivity is what I most hope for between now and the end of the year. With hope comes value in society. That’s something we need now more than ever.

Categories
Writing

Cold Weather is Here

Cold weather set in.

Since ambient temperatures dropped below freezing, I haven’t left the house very much. I’ve been reading, writing, cooking, and working on a few small projects. I wasn’t ready to bunker in.

I gave up on picking up more garden mulch with the mower. I disassembled the grass catcher and put it in place on the shelf. I also moved the electric snow blower closer to the garage door. With the subcompact Chevy Spark there is a lot more room in the garage. Step by step, I’m getting organized.

The small ceramic heater running next to my chair is doing the job of keeping my writing room warm. I hung a blanket on the door to retain heat, and that is doing its job as well. Now it’s time for me to do my job of writing.

Where does my writing get noticed? When I post on Twitter, the response can be huge. Yesterday I posted,

https://twitter.com/PaulDeaton_IA/status/1593977697767755776

Thus far there have been 3,872 impressions and 154 engagements. That is a lot.

When I post on Blog for Iowa, it garners many more views than here. Before the midterms I posted about Iowa Democratic gubernatorial candidate Deidre DeJear and the post got 507 views. That, too, is a lot.

Year to date this site got about 8,000 views, with the leading sources being search engines and the WordPress Reader. Thanks so much WordPress community for following me.

Now that cold weather is here, my in-person contact with humans reduced noticeably. I don’t like it, yet here we are. Hopefully my writing will improve and bring with it better cooking, reading, and a cleaner, more organized home. Despite the calendar suggestion we have another month of Autumn, it feels like winter is here.

Categories
Living in Society

Twitter Take Three

Despite yesterday’s mass resignation at Twitter, things seem back to normal. When an authoritarian boss gives employees an ultimatum to work harder or leave, for most people the only choice is to leave, thus depriving the authoritarian of their leverage. This is America. That is, unless your visa is based on such work and employees have morphed into slaves.

My freakout regarding Elon Musk buying Twitter is over. The big picture, obvious to any sentient being, is the transition is not going well. I don’t like the many little changes I’m seeing in the platform, yet I’m still there and will be for the short-term. Also, I can enter my birthday and get balloons on my account that day. That might be nice. Give me an edit button and it would be the cat’s meow.

Most of the rest of this post was written before Musk’s arbitrary deadline for employees last night. I plan to continue unless there is a subscription fee or the platform goes dark.

After the election I purged accounts. During a political campaign, the reasons for following had a shelf life until the general election. I got down to 160 or so. Now I’m thoughtfully curating a timeline that provides me the best of what is available and relevant. As of this writing, there are 173.

The core of people I follow are those with whom I have some personal connection or long term interaction on Twitter. I’ve been to their house, went to school with them, worked on a project together, or otherwise know them in real life. There is also a small cadre where I don’t recall how we got started in social media yet the thought of dropping them was too much to bear. This is to be expected.

I distilled the many possible local news reporters to a group of about a dozen that I either know or interact with frequently. I follow a few reporters who work for major news outlets, like the awesome investigative reporters Robin McDowell and Margie Mason with Associated Press, Emily Rauhala with the Washington Post, Jane Mayer and Elizabeth Kolbert with The New Yorker, and a few others. Wednesday I added Trip Gabriel with the New York Times and Vaughn Hillyard with NBC News. Both of them have been a frequent presence in Iowa doing political reporting and highlight important national stories without their tweets being too many.

After Michael Franken lost the Iowa U.S. Senate race, I had to find some Democratic senators to keep tabs on what the upper chamber was doing. Amy Klobuchar started following my account during the 2020 Iowa caucus cycle after I followed her, so there is one. I also decided to add back Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin. Chuck Grassley follows me, yet I don’t follow him any longer. I get plenty of information about Grassley from other sources, including occasional in-person encounters, and his weekly legislative newsletter. My other U.S. Senator is Joni Ernst. Because she is a rising Republican star, there is plenty of information available about her activities. I follow my congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks and she follows back.

Lastly, I revisited some of my connections with Friends Committee on National Legislation. I follow Joe Volk who is now retired and was general secretary when I visited in Washington, D.C. We did some events together in Iowa. I follow the current general secretary, Bridget Moix. I also follow Jim Cason whom I met in D.C. and Arnie Albert who was my D.C. roommate and is retired from American Friends Service Committee in New Hampshire. Friends Committee on National Legislation provides direct, accessible information about what’s going on in the capitol.

Like most users, I have no idea what Musk is doing. Perhaps he does, although Twitter users are doubtful and last night’s events were unexpected. He is apparently living at his office until whatever plans he has are realized. If he were to fail, which I doubt, I would shut it down and not seek another platform to replicate it. Twitter is useful for what it is –a valued news source. If it went away, I’d just have to adjust.

Categories
Living in Society

Archiving Twitter

DPRK Twitter Image

I heard about the Library of Congress partnership with Twitter to archive all of Twitter, past, present and future since its launch in 2006. I hadn’t heard the project went bust with insufficient funding in 2017. Too many tweets, one presumes.

Should we care? We should, but not because there is profound knowledge on Twitter.

Yes, noted scholars create multi-tweet threads with reasoned arguments, citations, and links to references. Yet what role does that play in advancing learning? The potential audience seems limited on Twitter. Wouldn’t the same argument inform more effectively in a newspaper, blog, or scholarly journal? It would be more targeted, for sure. Such targeting would garner better impact on learning than the transitory ephemera of Twitter..

News writers use tweets as a source of quotations from prominent people. A quote is a quote, I guess. It’s easy, which prompts the related sentence, “they are lazy.” What point are they making? Why not get an actual quote from a news maker? I know the answer: access is easier on Twitter. Definition of the word “access” is peculiar here.

With hundreds of millions of tweets per day, who could read all of that to glean valuable content? Some form of artificial intelligence or tweet-bot, maybe. Not a human. I can’t think of who would want to review all of that. I hardly look at my own tweets from yesterday, let alone something I posted in 2008. There are three hundred million or more tweets per day.

If a user considers their universe in Twitter, a time line can be carefully curated. It is only within this curation that any of it has much meaning. Archiving Twitter would seem to preserve little of that personal vantage point. Tweets are a fungible commodity only to the extent an individual user loses their individuality. We Americans resist that.

The role for libraries and archives with regard to Twitter and other social media platforms is to push governments to define better laws regarding collection, archiving, and ownership of our posting. As the example of Cambridge Analytica during the recent presidential election illustrates, there were few rules about scraping the internet to collect detailed voter information and using the aggregated data to influence the election. At what point does that become an illegal invasion of privacy? The answer hasn’t been defined and doing so falls in the wheelhouse of people who spend their lives compiling archives of information and documents.

When we examine the history of libraries and archives, my bet is as much that was important has been lost as was saved. I think of the Protestant Reformation and its raiding of libraries and archives to destroy the physical records of the Catholic Church. There are plenty of other examples. Regarding Twitter, if the Library of Congress can’t preserve it, then who can and to what end?

With planetary warming, we may not have to trouble ourselves with these questions for much longer. If archives exist to tell the story of humanity’s demise to beings living multiple millennia from now, there is no point. Like us, I doubt future such beings will be much interested in those billions of tweets.