An e-book morning
This morning rather than use the phone, check twitter, look at Facebook, or look at Instagram I took one of my two e-book readers. I have a Kobo and a Kindle device. I have both because I don’t want to lose all of my books if one company goes out of business.
Twitter and Facebook are filled with pushed content that we are not interested in. When we’re browsing our timelines it used to be to see what friends were doing or thinking about. For months now it has been re-shares and other impersonal content.
Twitter recently expanded the character limit and with this move, they also added threading, things that we had right from the start with Jaiku. I wouldn’t mind threading if it was designed in the way that forums had threading. Instead of writing a threaded tweet sequence why not take fifteen minutes to half an hour and write a blog post? With a blog post, you immediately say “I want to be verbose about what I’m thinking about”. It is also an opportunity for us to take back our right to the content we create because the adverts beside our content generate revenue for us.
Instagram is the latest “social network” to increase the amount of noise we get in our streams. They show images from strangers and companies instead of content from our friends. They also start to push hashtags to encourage us to follow topics rather than acquaintances.
Facebook,
The Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) that we felt in the past has been replaced by NAGO. ;-). We’re being nagged to follow specific accounts. Specific accounts post the same content in the morning and the afternoon, sometimes multiple days in a row. In so doing we have no compulsion to check our feeds.
We can dedicate hours to reading a book without interruption. We can leave aside our mobile phones and pick up the e-reader knowing that we are not missing out by not checking our feeds.