Replacing Social Media with Book reading

Replacing Social Media with Book reading

Byrichard

This year I am replacing Social Media with Book Reading because social media is no longer a conversational place. It has become a place for sensationalism and the spreading of fake news and emotional news. As a result of these factors the potential gain of new friendships and interesting conversations has declined. For this reason you might as well find some interesting books and broaden your horizons.

I currently have hundreds of books on Kindle and Audible and my collection on the Kobo reader is bound to grow. Recently I read Too Loud A Solitude. This is a book I came across by accident. I was browsing through Goodreads recommendations and it came up. The book is interesting because it tells the story of a person who worked compacting books for 35 years. Every chapter begins with the phrase “For 35 years…”. The journey is an interesting one because we see how someone with a passion for books rescues some before they are destroyed. It is worth reading when you have the interest and motivation.

Another interesting book I read is Tartarin Sur Les Alpes. This book is interesting because of its age. It is about the early days of Alpinism. It speaks of various mountains and locations that are easy to get to today but that were accessed by horse and carriage at the time. It also explores the early days of tourism.

Books require an investment of time of several hours in the same way that television series require. You can read a chapter or “episode” a day or you can binge through them reading several chapters in a single day. They usually require from seven to 21 hours to get through just like television series seasons. It’s easy to lose entire days.

I like e-books and I like audible books. As a result of this I can walk around with hundreds of books at a time and read from one book and then another. It transports me to different time periods and places. For a moment I stop living in the present. With audio books I can drive, hike or walk at the same time. I can be a bookworm without being stuck in a building.

It’s a shame that we don’t read more.

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Life Cycle by Northcube AB

Byrichard

Life Cycle by NorthCube AB is a life tracking application available on iphone. It allows you to keep track of your sports activities, time spent at work, sleeping, shopping, socialising and more. At first it knows nothing about it. It learns of your home location, your work location, where you go climbing and do other activities and then automatically logs the time spent doing various activities.

At the end of the day you can see how much time you spent at work, at home and running errands. If you go for a walk, a bike ride or a run it detects the difference in cadence and will log that sport. I did get false positives when riding the scooter. It logged this as cycling.

It also keeps track of the time you spend in transportation as well as the time you spend commuting to and from work. They are separated so that you can see how much of your day is devoted to commuting as opposed to travelling between locations for other activities.

If you practice sports such as swimming or climbing you can tell it that at this location you practice that sport. From this moment on every time you go to this location it will log it as being for that sport. This is valid for socialising, coffee, the cinema and more.

At the end of the day you can see a summary of how long you spent doing each activity. At the end of the week you can see how much time you spent on each activity. The bigger the donut slice the more time you spent on an activity. Assessing whether you spend too much time commuting, at work or socialising is simpler. As a freelancer working in a number of locations you could mark the locations where you worked and at the end of the week log your hours to double check that they are correct.

This app is simple and intuitive to use. Unlike Foursquare/Swarm and other apps it requires minimal interaction. This app is a natural progression from apps such as Google Latitude.

 

 

Reaction to Social media and the loss of identity

Byrichard

My answer to:

Social media and the loss of identity

From 1996–2007 I saw the World Wide Web, discussion forums and other places as opportunities to socialise with like minded people. Over the years we went from one platform to another using nicknames rather than our real identity. in 2006–2007 there was a shift. When Twitter came about I would post about my dissertation progress and eventually converse with more and more people. Eventually the @ symbol started to be used for answers and then we discussed meeting in person.

The online conversation moved from being about ideas and a virtual self to meeting in person. Twitter changed us from anonymous web users to friends in meat space as it was called at the time. At the same time as this occurred we also had Facebook and here the opposite took place. We took friends whom we drank, studied and collaborated with and added them to an online network. In effect social media extended our real life and our real life extended our online life. Social media became a lounge.

This was short lived. Within a year social media experts, marketers, celebrities and other characters took social media from being a conversation medium to being an observer/follower medium. The things that you worry about in your post are a consequence of the loss of engagement. We went from social networks where the more time you devoted to a network the more connections you had to a social environment where the more famous you had the more followers you had. Those followers don’t know you as a person. They know you as a projection. You become an illusion, an ideal. You lose your identity.

In a sense those of us that are still relatively unknown can be genuine. We follow those we know and they follow us. We also have mutual friends.

The Work-Visa program and US tech domination

Byrichard

Trump’s next steps could strike even closer to home: His administration has drafted an executive order aimed at overhauling the work-visa programs technology companies depend on to hire tens of thousands of employees each year

Source

Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Fitbit, Garmin and other companies benefit enormously from the international appeal that their products have. Not only do the products have great appeal but the environment within which they work is envied globally. Tech entrepreneurs from Europe and other regions migrate from Europe to the US precisely because they want to be part of the most influential tech landscape. By making this migration more complicated it could encourage technological development internationally.

According to a recent article in Le Temps scientists are considering a move from the United States to Switzerland, to continue their research at the EPFL.

By blocking migration from the rest of the world to the US people like Trump are reducing the flow of intellect and ideas for an industry that owes billions of dollars per year to international audiences. We saw the stories about Apple, the European Union and Ireland from a few months ago.

Under the Trump administration the US is saying “We want your money but not only will we not pay taxes in your nations but we will also not hire your skilled workers”. They are practically monopolising the global social media landscape at the moment. It would be nice to have European alternatives.

With the Trump administration I wish that I had EU alternatives to social networks. Could this be an encouragement to revert to blogging?